Last week, Google embarked upon the next chapter of its “Gemini era” by renaming its Bard AI assistant Gemini and launching a Gemini app on Android. Gemini could be the first real threat to ChatGPT’s dominance, but like ChatGPT, there are serious privacy concerns surrounding the AI assistant that Google itself is warning users about.
As spotted by ZDNet, Google recently updated the Gemini Apps Privacy Hub on its support site to inform users about how its conversational AI apps handle their data.
The privacy notice on that page explicitly states that Google will collect your conversations with Gemini, location data, related product usage information, and any feedback you provide. Google says that it uses all of the data it collects to “provide, improve, and develop Google products and services and machine learning technologies.”
While that might sound troubling, it’s fairly standard operating procedure for these technologies, whether we like it or not. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Near the top of the Gemini Apps Privacy Hub, Google shares the following warning:
Please don’t enter confidential information in your conversations or any data you wouldn’t want a reviewer to see or Google to use to improve our products, services, and machine-learning technologies.
Google employs human reviewers who “read, annotate, and process” your conversations with Gemini. While Google says that it disconnects the conversations from your Google Account and removes personally identifying information before reviewers see them, there’s only so much the company can do if you’re sharing loads of personal data.
But here’s the most concerning part of the notice: “These sample conversations are reviewed by trained reviewers and kept for up to three years, separately from your Google Account.”
If you want to avoid having your data sitting on Google’s servers for up to three years, you can turn off Gemini Apps Activity from this page. Google says that if you turn the setting off, “future conversations won’t be sent for human review or used to improve our generative machine-learning models.” You can also delete your activity from there.