Tell HN: Gemini trains on chat history, even for subscribers (personal accounts)
If you have a personal Google AI subscription, all your saved chat history in Gemini can be used for training and there is no way to opt out unless you turn off chat history or use temporary chat sessions. These chat transcripts may even be read by human reviewers. Although Google claims to disconnect them from your account when human-reviewed, they explicitly warn not to enter confidential information.
https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/16836988
“[Gemini app activity] is used to improve Google services for everyone, including by training generative AI models, if your Keep Activity setting is on.“
https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/13594961?hl=en#human_review
“A subset of chats are reviewed by human reviewers”
https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/13594961?hl=en#pn_retain_data
“Chats reviewed by human reviewers [...] are not deleted when you delete your activity. Instead, they are retained for up to three years.”
https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/13594961?hl=en#pn_data_usage
“Please don’t enter confidential information that you wouldn’t want a reviewer to see or Google to use to improve our services, including machine-learning technologies.”
To disable their training on your chat sessions, you need to turn off “Keep Activity” in Gemini’s settings. Turning that off means you’ll lose any chat sessions after 72 hours.
I learned this too late, thinking that having a paid subscription = not being turned into the product. Apparently paying is not enough.
Thank you to this user on HN for mentioning in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50355424
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?
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 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.
> This is expected these days for threads which may make the provider liable. [...]
> They're being retained for legal purposes.
It’s a significantly wider usage than that:
A subset of chats are reviewed by human reviewers (including Google’s trained service providers) to help improve Google services. These include Gemini models, other generative AI models that power Gemini Apps, and technologies that help reduce unintended activations.
Reviewers assess if Gemini Apps’ responses were low-quality, inaccurate, or harmful. They also suggest better responses. We use their suggestions to help our models respond better in the future.
That’s in addition to the liability language:
Chats are also reviewed to keep Gemini safe and secure for everyone and to address violations of the Google Terms of Service, including the Generative AI Prohibited Use Policy. Reviewed chats are retained for up to three years.
https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/13594961?hl=en#huma...
If you care about this, this is trivial to find out in minutes. Just disable chat history; in this mode Gemini has the shortest retention among the three major LLM chats, and the chats are not used for training.
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!
This is one of the reason I unsubscribed from Gemini Pro, apart from the fact that the experience with Gemini has been underwhelming.
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
every thing you read, every keycap you press. Every mail you read, every call you make, permanently recording you
You'll never play that at a wedding.
OpenAI chat sends everything when you type. Better edit the prompt elsewhere.
Even before pressing enter? What would be the reason for that? Faster responses?
Predicting autocomplete for the prompt. They do suggest the remaining of the prompt. Not sure if that is the main purpose.
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.
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.
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.
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
Every AI trains on the input given to it
This is false.
eg Gemini enterprise has a note under each chat session explicitly saying it’s not used to improve the models
I assume that everyone does this no matter what they say. Seems like too juicy a target
Obviously anthropic are doing this. Hence their "don't insult Claude too much" policy.
Scary!
It might matter if Gemini was good enough to use but its not - I only use ChatGPT and Claude.
For daily chat gemini is great.
actually even gemma locally is great for a lot of chat purposes.
Their recent Argon is weak as well. But then they promise Carbon going to be world changing. Yeah sure.
We should all be writing bots that constantly spam all of these so-called AIs with random nonsense to poison the well.
Ah yes, the poison-the-product-you're-trying-to-use strategy
another Google W I guess? gemini really leading the pack over here
W I?
"...Google W[in,] I guess..."