"These chat transcripts may even be read by human reviewers."

PSA: This is true of all the frontier model providers even if you disable activity tracking. They are all constantly monitoring your interactions for problematic behavior.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/advice/ai-chat-privacy/

[1]: https://www.404media.co/inside-project-lily-the-humans-readi...

[2]: https://www.winknews.com/news/woman-arrested-after-ai-threat...

What's worse is if you have a Pixel phone then Gemini is completely useless without enabling this setting.

I had it switched off:

"Hey Google, remind me at 7pm <something>"

"OK, your reminder is set for 7pm"

Next day:

"Hey Google, why didn't you remind me at 7pm"

"I can't do anything with your phone unless you enable chat history."

WTAF!

> Please don’t enter confidential information that you wouldn’t want a reviewer to see or Google

If Gemini has access to app data like gallery, mail etc that can also be subjected to human review? I imagine that will also be part of the context.

They are vague when they say 'don't enter'. Is it only prompts or does it also cover other data too.

Is this really surprising to anyone?

I just sorta assumed that Google was hoovering up anything I type into its AI and don't tell it anything too personal or sensitive.

Is anyone under the illusion that our data is not being collected, whether it's Google or literally even the seemingly innocuous TVs in our home that have been found to be spying on us 24/7?

It's stuff like this that makes me happy that at least one big tech company (Apple) cares about privacy. Hope they don't lose that. Although I wonder how much of that is exactly why they're behind in AI...

imho you should act as if everything you type, not even send, is stored forever and might be used for training whenever they decide to retro actively change their TOS, no matter how much money you pay

I don't trust any of the providers, but at the same time I think you're reading into the terms too much for wrong reasons. Yes, you have to opt out. But:

> A subset of chats are reviewed by human reviewers

This is expected these days for threads which may make the provider liable. Just look at the recent death case due to bad GPT medication recommendation.

> Chats reviewed by human reviewers [...] are not deleted when you delete your activity. Instead, they are retained for up to three years.

They're being retained for legal purposes.

> Please don’t enter confidential information...

This is so they don't accidentally preserve it for review, but also they don't want you to share private info that the agent will post somewhere without an explicit approval.

Those points make sense for them, regardless what other T&C rules apply.

I am not sure why anyone expected anything different from Google. This is a company that lives and thrives on user data and tracking users. Users are the material that is being run through this entire huge ad-selling machine.

I’m very very surprised that anyone is surprised by this!

And if you do want privacy, and you purchase a workspace business plan instead… well then you have the pleasure of paying more and not having access to the latest models (and having no idea when you might get access to them eventually months later).

it’s all trained. that’s why i made trustedrouter so that it can be end to end encrypted ai chats

Is anyone actually surprised by this? They've devoured the whole internet for training already, the stream of shit coming in from users is the only way to hoover up more training data.

They train on our code as well so they can replace us sooner

They should offer history + not training (every other big AI company is offering that). The only way to get that currently is to use Gemini in Google Workspace.

There is also no opt out of training on their personal AI coding side with Antigravity.

And while there at it they should also allow to buy Youtube Premium Full normally when you've got Google AI Pro yearly which includes Youtube Premium Lite. The add+on price is like over 100% the price than buying Youtube Premium Full in my country and no way to buy normally :(

This why I advocate Deepseek, GLM, Kimi, Qwen as in hosted directly (send data) to China. Think about it, what can they do worse off than what our own backyard AI can do? There is no privacy advantage in Western AI. It is way more likely ours leak your data to dark web (solid track records for decades) or get law enforcers on you. Meanwhile, am I suppose to be worried, China sending their Ming-like Eastern Bureau to my home in the west? On dark web, aplenty western companies leaks. How frequent the eastern one?

Aren't they all like that?

Why do you all think they got so good at coding and why they give us cheap personal cheap subscriptions for $200/month?

Of course they have been using our data all this time.

Even if they don't train on your content, Google reserves the right to use it for improving their services in other ways:

“ This license is for the limited purpose of operating the services, which means allowing the services to work as designed and creating new features and functionalities. ”

https://policies.google.com/terms?hl=en-US#toc-permission

The training exclusion has always been a distraction. These service providers have plenty of other uses for your data.

This shouldn't be surprising at all.

Anytime you aren't paying full price for something, you are paying the rest with something else. We know the real cost because there is an API that comes with all the confidentiality, and that is much more expensive.

FYI, this is true for the other labs too.

This probably explains why I see random google employees I've never met in my facebook "people you may know" feed.

We're out of training data, they need to get fresh data somewhere

In this true age of AI, privacy is virtually non-existent. I now make it a point not to share my secret keys or account information when chatting with Gemini, for fear that such data might be leaked.

I always keep this in mind when interacting with proprietary LLMs. As someone who heavily relies on residential proxies over Tor and constantly rotates accounts (or avoids creating them entirely, as with Gemini Flash), I sometimes exploit this to subtly inject or promote public-interest ideas (mostly related to privacy) into the training data.

Is there a way to use an API to export locally all the temporary chats and restore them as temporary chats for the next session? I am sure they’ll disable those eventually too, or even worse block your whole account for misuse.

The fact that HN has to be told this is quite surprising. Google et al have been doing this underhanded, sneaky behavior well before LLM hype.

Privacy at big tech is a facade.

Friendly reminder that you should take measures to ensure your agentic workflows are secret-blind. E.g. place secrets by reference, check by reference, do NOT have agents read secret sensitive files without redaction measures in place, and be prepared to rotate on contact

I know they say not to enter confidential information, but they are basically using the LLM to spy on users it's unfortunate. Even deleting chats doesn't help because they keep that information for another year or 2.

Jokes on them all my gemini chat are youtube link I want a summary of

I assume that everyone does this no matter what they say. Seems like too juicy a target

>thinking that having a paid subscription = not being turned into the product

This has never been true in techbro capitalism land. The paying members of a project are even more valuable in your datasets because you want to understand their behavior so you can pull more whales, I mean convert some customers :)

training on "no i don't need google search to nurse me after a breakup, i was just asking what movie has the line she just dumped me"

Then people are totally fine puting all sort of private stuff in Notebooklm or Gemini notebook.

Use a self-hosted chat app with paid-tier of API tokens.

that's why i don't use gemini for anything serious or personal. if you want persistant memory you should enable keep activity, but keeping activity allows google to use your chats.

It's just keeping track of all the times you were mean

You guys must be joking if you don’t want the AI to get better stop using it. NIMBY for your precious chat logs.

If a company can do something that benefits them, and there is no way the customer can find out or prove that, the company will do it.

why am i not suprised

It might matter if Gemini was good enough to use but its not - I only use ChatGPT and Claude.

This is one of the reasons why I unsubscribed from Gemini Pro, apart from the fact that the experience with Gemini has been frankly underwhelming.

Never trust google.

we already knew this - google is gonna google - same way they train on your google photos and emails.

If it’s not an iPhone it’s … not an iPhone.

Every AI trains on the input given to it

Scary!

another Google W I guess? gemini really leading the pack over here

I mean, this is google we talking about

also the same cases for antrophic and open ai

why would anyone trust company that literally need data to improve their product ????

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We should all be writing bots that constantly spam all of these so-called AIs with random nonsense to poison the well.