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fny 1 days ago [-]
"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.
The sole reason LLMs has gotten this good is because their aggressive expansion has been accompanied with literally this. The amount of uncredited information these models have been fed must be astonishing, also terrifying.
synalx 20 hours ago [-]
I think the heavily subsidized subscriptions are exactly for this purpose - the training data they generate is worth the high subsidy.
jpardoe 3 hours ago [-]
They're almost certainly making a profit on subscriptions.
red-iron-pine 19 hours ago [-]
i mean openai basically said as much, no? it's free for all so that they can train the models better and get real world interaction data.
cma 18 hours ago [-]
Yes, Altman called it the data flywheel in 2022.
terramauthe 11 hours ago [-]
yeah, but in 2026 the interaction data of the average user isn't adding much to training. only the really exceptional users.
MisterMunchkin 22 hours ago [-]
Why do you think they’re getting into consulting now?
Imagine all those tasty confidential IP and contract documents they have ingested. You couldn’t buy those.
cududa 1 days ago [-]
That is, fundamentally the marketing ploy of “AI Safety”.
For an AI system to be “completely safe”, like a self-driving car, it must map the full environment it operates in and be taught the “right way” to handle every conceivable scenario.
So when you present it with novel data or a situation, that constitutes an “AI safety event”, which per their ToS is a carve out for training on your session.
Further, go read the ToS carefully about what you opt out of. You’ll note there’s nary a mention of tool calls. You’re only opting out inputs (what you type) and outputs from the model from being trained on. All the content of the tool calls made while running on your system are fair game for training.
eckr 24 hours ago [-]
There is no way this is true, no? This'd mean literally all codebases people are working with have been trained on. There's no way anyone would use these guys if that was the case?
bethekidyouwant 24 hours ago [-]
Why are you using it if you don’t want it to get better whose data is it supposed to get better on just somebody elses, not yours?
popinman322 23 hours ago [-]
They're supposed to be focused on genuine training improvements over existing data, including via RL. Gathering data under the table is misaligned behavior.
degamad 3 hours ago [-]
> including via RL.
Can you please expand on what you believe RL looks like in this context?
22 hours ago [-]
whycombilater 23 hours ago [-]
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alberto467 23 hours ago [-]
Well for us Europeans, GDPR explicitly allows them to store pretty much anything if somebody can claim it’s for safety.
It’s literally just complicating things and providing zero reassurance to us AI customers.
tveyben 19 hours ago [-]
For safety - hmm new for me (European), please elaborate.
manmal 17 hours ago [-]
You don’t need user consent to retain data that’s arguably needed to provide the service itself. I guess, safety falls into that category. Training on that data is probably a grey area, if they can guarantee it won’t contain PII. They have stolen all the internet, so I wouldn’t bet highly on their restraint.
Dylan16807 5 hours ago [-]
It's very easy to prove that training is not necessary to provide the service, because whenever you're using a model it's static and the training only maybe goes into new models.
whycombilater 23 hours ago [-]
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fierycatnet 20 hours ago [-]
I can guarantee you that multiple people are reviewing some chats. This is very similar to Apen and whatever company prior to that for reviewing Google searches. They'd hire out contractors with NDA.
richrichardsson 1 days ago [-]
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!
devsda 1 days ago [-]
This was the case with Google Assistant too.
Google has this pattern of all or nothing approach.
Maps refuses to show your *current* location if you don't enable location accuracy i.e. if you won't allow it to spy on your WiFi or Bluetooth it refuses to show your current location at all. GPS, what's that?
We can disable notifications and even phone access but physical activity is the one permission that cannot be disabled for play services !?
Google apps have a lot of WTFs!
BoppreH 1 days ago [-]
And the YouTube home page is blank if you have Watch History off. The recommendation algorithm still runs on the side bar of any video you watch, but the home page refuses to even show your subscriptions.
ACCount39 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, this is just Google punishing people for not enabling their data harvesting.
There's no reason they can't have a mix of "this is popular in general" and "your subs and likes suggest you'd like this" on the front page - they just don't want people to disable watch history. They are required to offer that as an option, but they'll never stop pestering you about it.
OvervCW 1 days ago [-]
I'm surprised they don't just store your watch history anyway , with the toggle option being "don't show me or people looking over my shoulder my watch history".
TingPing 24 hours ago [-]
My watch history is set to 3 months. It used to constantly show things I had already seen. However eventually (years ago) I just don’t get repeats.
syshyk 8 hours ago [-]
I have a whole add-on just to default/redirect me to my subscriptions page.
SoftTalker 1 days ago [-]
That could be seen as a feature.
rolosa 22 hours ago [-]
That's actually a plus.
aquentinn 16 hours ago [-]
Welcome to monopoly where they get the free videos from the sheep and still order you around. Why has Youtube not been disrupted btw, everyone gave up or did VCs order it?
latexr 1 days ago [-]
> And the YouTube home page is blank if you have Watch History off.
That one I do like. YouTube’s homepage (at least without an account and with history off) is a cesspool of uninteresting clickbait garbage so I’m glad to have it off. I do agree they seem to think of it as some kind of punishment¹, which makes it all the more satisfying that it works as I want it.
¹ It’s now entirely blank for me, but I remember when they started doing this (it wasn’t always the case) they showed a message that suggested not having a homepage was undesirable.
BoppreH 23 hours ago [-]
Agree, but it should at least show recent uploads from my subscription. It's stupid that I can visit "www.youtube.com" and not see a single video.
BeetleB 21 hours ago [-]
I have to say - I actually like this.
Imagine if you go to Google.com to do a web search, and it is a page full of recommendations on sites to visit. Would you want that?
BoppreH 19 hours ago [-]
The difference is that I'm subscribed to a variety of channels on YouTube. Yes, I do want to see their videos on the front page. That's what the Subscriptions page is doing anyway.
BeetleB 19 hours ago [-]
Yes, but what algorithm will it use to show videos from the channels you're subscribed to? Will you and everyone else agree with that choice of algorithm? The only one that makes sense is chronological. Anything else leads to similar problems as in the past.
BoppreH 19 hours ago [-]
Yes, why not? Chronological is infinitely better than a blank homepage.
BeetleB 16 hours ago [-]
I agree, but most people do not. A quite common complaint of Mastodon - even here on HN - is that chronological makes discovery difficult.
dTal 2 hours ago [-]
You know what makes discovery difficult? A blank page
Timon3 6 hours ago [-]
I find it hard to believe anyone prefers "no results" to "chronological results".
Sayrus 16 hours ago [-]
> We can disable notifications and even phone access but physical activity is the one permission that cannot be disabled for play services !?
Sandboxed Play Services works on Grapheneos without physical activity so it's definitely not actually required by their services.
It's no wtf. Google is an ad company so they want all your data to target ads at you.
WarmWash 1 days ago [-]
People use Google everyday, block all ads, get extremely angry about Google's grubby advertising hands, and then when you tell them their are paid services like Kagi and Proton...."pay for this stuff? Nah, I have a right to it for free!"
bonoboTP 1 days ago [-]
Payment doesn't guarantee anything tho. We are right now in a thread about a paid product by Google still spying.
Yes, it's almost like a fairy tale where children are offered candy but then very bad things happen. Hansel und Gretel, etc. We should have known all along!
wingmanjd 1 days ago [-]
Continuing with your Hansel and Gretel metaphor, the first time the candy turned sour for me was Goog-411. It was a service (at least over here in the US) that allowed you to look up local businesses via voice prompts over a phone call. When the service was still active, calling 411 via a mobile phone had a per-call cost, so a free lookup service seemed great.
I found out later that Goog411 was created to primarily train on the voice prompts from the users of the service. Left a really bad taste.
WmWsjA6B29B4nfk 1 days ago [-]
I've just turned off location accuracy, google maps displayed a popup said results will be better if I turn it on, and after dismissing the popup it did use GPS to localize me with no issues.
wafflemaker 18 hours ago [-]
GPS only navigation is really bad. Takes ages to get a lock, especially in bad weather.
There are though some more privacy friendly alternatives that I remember from playing with GrapheneOS settings.
dTal 1 hours ago [-]
Funny, it works just fine for cruise missiles.
And on phones. In my experience, a hot start fix (with up to date ephemeris) shouldn't take more than a couple seconds. Maybe you have a bad antenna.
indigo945 1 days ago [-]
This will only work for a few weeks, after which the location will be missing entirely. (Which just makes it more obvious that this is an intended feature, not a bug.)
WmWsjA6B29B4nfk 1 days ago [-]
If true, what you described makes it sound exactly like a bug, not an intended feature.
franktankbank 1 days ago [-]
A/B testing rules
gherkinnn 16 hours ago [-]
Surely that approach is implemented to force people in to the all group.
Then again, anon YouTube no longer showing recommendations on the start page is what waned me off the website.
marcosdumay 23 hours ago [-]
Last time I tried, Maps also refused to show a map at all, from anywhere if you didn't enable your location.
user_7832 1 days ago [-]
> Google has this pattern of all or nothing approach.
Call it what it is, please. User-hostile behaviour that compels you to turn their tracking on if you want to use any of the practically helpful services.
I'm a super privacy conscious person, and even I end up keeping many of these things on simply because I want to use for eg google assistant.
rhema 1 days ago [-]
Worst part is that the history lives with your other gemini chats. So, "set timer for x" 85 times gets muddled into chats where I'm doing deep research.
kekqqq 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, I am hugely annoyed by this. I kept paying for the subscription for a year and a half, but I think I will stop now, as I feel that the added value is very small in comparison to Claude Code or just using openrouter open models.
shostack 1 days ago [-]
This is the most infuriating part. Complete bait and switch by bricking features of the phone I bought before Gemini for practically anything that used assistant.
They are not transparent about it either. Anything you link to it to enable basic functionality you had on device before gets them the ability to use it for not just training but ads and measurement.
elesiuta 1 days ago [-]
This has been annoying me too, and I was getting pretty close to turning on chat history having forgotten why I disabled it.
Thanks for the reminder OP!
pscanf 23 hours ago [-]
But don't worry, Gemini is nearly completely useless even if you do enable the setting.
lacoolj 23 hours ago [-]
Yeah its the worst. I reported it as a bug to them. Obviously ill never get a response
eitally 1 days ago [-]
This is a risk issue. They need users to explicitly opt in or they risk user-data-related compliance suits. This has always been Google's problem, as an advertising company, and why they've taken so many seemingly awkward paths over the years with both Android & Cloud.
Tarq0n 9 hours ago [-]
Or they could just not collect the data? Apple's assistant may suck, but it degrades gracefully if you don't grant it certain permissions.
devsda 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
KellyCriterion 1 days ago [-]
Wasnt there an announcement some weeks ago here on HN that one of the BigTechs popular services are now including your personal pictures as well? Wasnt it Google?
illwrks 1 days ago [-]
Exactly, I have a Gemini Pro account, I can’t see how privacy can be maintained. If I ask Gemini to take the content of an email and added the dates to my calendar, then all of that private information might as well be public then!
hanspeter 20 hours ago [-]
Your email, Google docs, Google photos, Google home devices etc. are all subject to human review. The data is on their servers.
And this goes for all cloud providers btw.
giwook 1 days ago [-]
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?
aquentinn 16 hours ago [-]
Yeah, don't be under the illusion people, just take it and don't talk about it. It's not surprising, so just bend and shut up. It's not like you have courts and a Congress and this thing called democracy, you're helpless so why you keep being surprised at being cheated out and act like you can or want to do something about it, by starting with talking about it?
delecti 19 hours ago [-]
It can be difficult to connect the abstract knowledge that Google collects their data with the concrete reality of an AI training on that data, or a human manually reviewing it.
misiek08 1 days ago [-]
People read privacy polices and believe them. It’s like EU cookies alerts that are automatically dismissed by 99.9% of people, accepting everything.
TaLiTr 1 days ago [-]
> People read privacy polices and believe them.
Literally the opposite.
People don't read privacy policies, even ones designed to be readable.
The privacy policy says it grabs everything, and there's nothing that says they'll stop just because you pay them.
giwook 1 days ago [-]
And even when they say they don't they still do if I'm remembering the whole Chrome incognito window scandal correctly.
latexr 1 hours ago [-]
> the whole Chrome incognito window scandal
Wasn’t that just people misunderstanding incognito as making you private to websites as opposed to private on your own computer (no data persisted locally)? Or are you thinking of something different?
latexr 23 hours ago [-]
> It’s like EU cookies alerts that are automatically dismissed by 99.9% of people, accepting everything.
The numbers are meaningfully smaller than that, and decrease even more when the banners are compliant (i.e. as easy to reject all as it is to accept all).
The abuse of "legitimate" interest needs to be cracked down on for them to become useful again sadly.
viraptor 1 days ago [-]
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.
swatcoder 1 days ago [-]
What you describe is almost certainly what the legal team who drafted the terms and processes had in mind.
But there's two reasons to bring cautionary attention to it anyway:
1. As a user, I may not be okay with those terms as they stand and may not have the legal insight to have intuited them. In as much as I have a choice, because of those terms, I may want to use Gemini less/differently or look at other providers that have crafted less shrewd and defensive legalese and processes.
2. As a executive or manager at Google, whether working directly in feature management, or advertising, or government compliance, these same terms define the framework for anything I want to develop. What "makes sense" from a defensive legal standpoint today can the open door for an exploitative or otherwise unexpected use later.
I get what you're saying here in terms of plausible or justifiable "innocence", but that probably shouldn't get in the way of some critical personal reflection for users.
jameslk 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
* They’re claiming to use chat transcripts for both training and for human review to improve training, not just for liability.
* They don’t define “subset”. It could be most chats.
* They make no promises of anonymizing content, just “disconnecting” it from the account.
* This is happening for free and paid user subscriptions, by default, and the only way to stop it is to turn off chat history altogether.
1 days ago [-]
bonoboTP 1 days ago [-]
You cannot opt out, except by using only temporary chats. You cannot keep your chat histories visible to yourself only. If you want to access your previous chats, you cannot opt out of human review and training models on your chats.
origini 1 days ago [-]
I disabled it because of the human in the loop.
Don't care for what, store it away audit save if you have to, talk to laywers in case you need to read through them but don't let random people read my stuff.
And in this case stuff = AI discussion which feels to me similiar to my google docs documents im hoping/expecting Google also to not read
geraneum 18 hours ago [-]
> This is expected these days for threads which may make the provider liable.
This doesn’t make sense. In such cases data could be reviewed by court order. That’s not something you’d have to agree to in tos.
Roark66 1 days ago [-]
I think such liability as "someone talks to the chatbot, gets wrong reply and poisons themselves" could be disclaimer by such conditions: "Our chat is unsuitable to discuss topics X, Y and Z. If you choose to discuss them anyway you're doing it at your own risk.
But this would require an admission of limitations of the technology.
Do people sue Google if search links to a page that has misleading info that results in someone taking a wrong drug? Nope.
Do we sue the browser maker when the info on a given Web page is malicious? Also no.
So, I don't understand why we treat chatbot providers any different. Everyone should be expected not to believe a word they say without corroboration.
TZubiri 1 days ago [-]
Azure's OpenAI terms are similar but more explicit with the safety and no-training terms.
Some chats are saved for 14-30 days IF they trigger a safety classifier, but they are never used to train future models or retained after that period, the objective is to verify safety. Simple as that.
If you are a business user, like in the case of Azure OpenAI, the analysis and priorities are quite different though, but the mechanism seems to be the same.
wat10000 1 days ago [-]
They literally say they train on your prompts.
233mhz 1 days ago [-]
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
nicce 1 days ago [-]
OpenAI chat sends everything when you type. Better edit the prompt elsewhere.
finger 1 days ago [-]
Even before pressing enter? What would be the reason for that? Faster responses?
nicce 1 days ago [-]
Predicting autocomplete for the prompt. They do suggest the remaining of the prompt. Not sure if that is the main purpose.
dgellow 1 days ago [-]
And just general tracking/analytics
usern20260720 1 days ago [-]
every thing you read, every keycap you press. Every mail you read, every call you make, permanently recording you
frereubu 1 days ago [-]
You'll never play that at a wedding.
spider-mario 24 hours ago [-]
Since you’ve gone, I’ve been lost without a thinking trace
inib 21 hours ago [-]
oh can't you see, your data belong to me
sandynor84 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
dgellow 1 days ago [-]
It’s a terrible way to live. We built and are building such an anti-human society
jwr 1 days ago [-]
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.
r_klancer 1 days ago [-]
I work with user data in Search and this is a common sentiment ... but I think it slightly misstates the purpose of using user data.
The primary purpose has always been improving search overall -- traditionally this has meant updating query interpretation, ranking, presentation, etc for smaller and smaller query slices ("Ah, when we show the mayor and the population in response to [Barcelona] people just revise their query to [Barcelona FC], so we should make sure to include latest match result on the top. Not so for [New York]."), and running tests on every product change to see what people like. In this case nobody cares about any _individual_ user's data, only the collective. This is basically the original "collective intelligence" contract of PageRank, albeit hillclimbing on billions of searches and clicks instead of using link structure. (Old question: does original PageRank count as machine learning, or not?)
Second is personalization -- things like "Oh, my flight or my delivery is expected on date X, handy that gmail popped a reminder on my calendar, good work Google." Or searching for a restaurant in Maps and seeing results that are biased towards the kinds of restaurants you already like, that kind of thing.
When it comes to revenue the purpose of these isn't to target ads, it's just to have you get value from and use the product, and when you are ready to spend money this is where you come to search for the thing, whatever it is.
Finally there is limited use of a limited set of data for ads relevance. There's higher CPC for ads you might actually be interested in (and if you are looking to spend money, is finding a willing seller who has compelling terms via an ad such a bad thing?) But ad revenue is mostly downstream of users being satisfied with the core product and using it more, whatever that product is. (Search, Maps, AI chat, etc)
(Bonus. My Search pro tip re: ads is leverage the modern stack and spell out your intent with a few more words when you query. We're pretty good at not serving ads for non-commercial queries. But old-school super short "searchese" queries make it hard to guess whether your intent is commercial or not.)
gardnr 1 days ago [-]
Oh, I get it now. The anti-user behaviour is actually there to help me as a user. The main goal isn’t to Hoover up all my data to profile me and serve more targeted ads in more places. The main goal is to make search better. Now I get it.
keeda 1 days ago [-]
> The main goal is to make search better.
It is actually, but the shady part is that this is not (just) to target ads to you, though that certainly happens… it is, as OP explained, so that they can better capture query intent AND your behavior (clicks, dwell time, subsequent searches, etc) that they then use to refine and rerank search results, which improves Google Search and keeps you using it, which becomes a virtuous flywheel that competitors can’t catch up to.
One way for competitors to break through is to buy traffic, but well Google blocked that too by using its monopoly profits to pay more than anybody else (Apple and Mozilla search deals.)
All of this came out in the Search Antitrust trial. Look up NavBoost for instance.
jwr 23 hours ago [-]
> The primary purpose has always been improving search overall
That is what I believed, a long time ago, too. At this point I'd say this kind of thinking falls somewhere between idealistic and naive on a spectrum.
If better search were indeed the goal, we would have had better search a long time ago. But we don't. In fact, search gets worse over time, devolving into an ad-ridden mess freely gamed by SEO content farms, and now with a dumb-but-cheap-AI cherry on top.
dgellow 1 days ago [-]
Would you prefer to not have people discuss the topic, just because you’re already familiar with how evil google is? Lots of younger people didn’t have out experience of seeing companies evolve into the current evil they are, or do not follow the industry
wseqyrku 2 hours ago [-]
> unless you turn off chat history
That just blocks your own view.
wafflemaker 18 hours ago [-]
While we're touching on de-googling.
Can anybody recommend a good Swype¹ keyboard that is not G-board?
Old Swype+Dragon is dead.
Google regularly removes words they don't like from my dictionary. For example swear words, or today, I had to re-type GrapheneOS.
AD 1: By Swype I mean writing on Android by dragging my finger through the letters making up the words I want to type.
I also miss being able to easily use ctrl+c,x,v or easily entering space or other special characters, using special gestures.
There is just so many FOSS keyboards, that it's hard to choose from them. And I hope somebody with similar usage patterns could share what they are using.
For subscribing users: Disable “Keep Activity”, don’t use Gemini Web/Mobile apps and do all your chatting needs inside a Gemini Notebook. I understood that Notebooks are walled off. To the extent that that is true I cannot be sure. YMMV. Alternatively, maybe run models locally.
mackwell 1 days ago [-]
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).
baggachipz 1 days ago [-]
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.
TZubiri 1 days ago [-]
Yes IF the Terms of Services and UI communicate otherwise. It's not normal for a company like Google to break ToS or Privacy Policy, would be quite novel.
baggachipz 1 days ago [-]
All they have to do is change it after the fact. The idea that they would self-police is laughable.
WarmWash 1 days ago [-]
Can you give an example of when they did this to retroactively shield themselves.
I don't think people understand that while consumers are dumb, uneducated, and broke, enterprise is a cash cow with a experts and a legal team.
If you serve them, like Google does on a massive scale, these ToS "gotchas" will do you in faster than you can say "lawsuit".
Jensson 1 days ago [-]
If they want to do something with your data they just change the terms before they do it, it is so easy and consequence free to legally abuse this that I'm not sure why you think they would do it the illegal way.
baggachipz 1 days ago [-]
Public perception. "Look, we care about your privacy! We won't use your data!"
six months later
Quietly update the ToS to allow them to retroactively use all of your history and data going forward, attempt to fly under the radar and/or gaslight users that it's always been that way
everdrive 21 hours ago [-]
It's good to record this sort of information, but I hope no one expects any of the big LLM tools to be even remotely private. This is big tech in 2026. They don't even need to prove they can make money on your information. They're going to take every little last bit of information they can conceive of. 100% of the time.
Haven880 1 days ago [-]
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?
danelski 1 days ago [-]
That’s a take I see often, and it always overblows the direct personal threat while understating the more abstract societal one. A Western AI company might report you for plotting a murder or a mass attack, but that’s not the issue for most people. Mass observation of what society thinks deep down and manipulating it with that data is a problem for both, and maybe more so for external actors, since they don’t have even a remote reason to care about your well-being.
You’d maybe want to counter with something like 'But Google/Amazon/whoever just wants to sell me stuff!'. What makes you think that Chinese B2C would just pass on that opportunity?
OGWhales 1 days ago [-]
I feel that saying "they just want to sell me stuff" undersells what Western data markets do with our data. It can and is used in ways beyond just advertising.
I also don’t know that I agree with your idea that manipulation is a greater risk from foreign actors. You're right to point out that it can be a problem from either, but local actors have a particularly direct incentive to shape the opinions and behavior of the population whose views affect their own power and interests. I would not argue that means foreign actors are harmless, I just don't agree they are necessarily worse either.
WarmWash 1 days ago [-]
The soviet union collected data and profiled American citizens so that they could (potentially) be used as dumb pawns if needed. Dumb pawns that didn't even know that they were doing the bidding of the soviet union.
Just like how Kim Jong Un killed his brother using dumb pawns to actually carry out the murder.
So if your head has not grasped this reality, then they are already two steps ahead of your "What could they possibly do".
This is also the reason why congress keeps banning Chinese enterprise. It's not because they care about privacy, it's because they care about people being turned into pawns.
purplemantis 22 hours ago [-]
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...
therealmarv 24 hours ago [-]
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 :(
fweimer 1 days ago [-]
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.
”
The training exclusion has always been a distraction. These service providers have plenty of other uses for your data.
123102937946124 1 days ago [-]
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.
WarmWash 1 days ago [-]
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.
rdtsc 1 days ago [-]
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.
wewewedxfgdf 1 days ago [-]
It might matter if Gemini was good enough to use but its not - I only use ChatGPT and Claude.
Haven880 1 days ago [-]
Their recent Argon is weak as well. But then they promise Carbon going to be world changing. Yeah sure.
kuboble 1 days ago [-]
For daily chat gemini is great.
actually even gemma locally is great for a lot of chat purposes.
Tryvrsakjo10 1 days ago [-]
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.
cby821555203 1 days ago [-]
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.
mark_l_watson 1 days ago [-]
right on. My family shares a Gemini AI Pro account and it is a good service. For financial, medical, and other personal chats, use private AI offerings from Proton Lumo or DuckDuckGo.
daqulalin 23 hours ago [-]
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icantevenhold 1 days ago [-]
I assume that everyone does this no matter what they say.
Seems like too juicy a target
reasonableklout 21 hours ago [-]
I wouldn't go that far. These companies are leaky and there can be a backlash that causes people to lose trust and move to competitors. For instance, when people discovered the Grok CLI was uploading repositories to the cloud despite the training toggle being disabled.
2III7 1 days ago [-]
Obviously anthropic are doing this. Hence their "don't insult Claude too much" policy.
hollowturtle 1 days ago [-]
We're out of training data, they need to get fresh data somewhere
1 days ago [-]
andsoitis 23 hours ago [-]
I’m very very surprised that anyone is surprised by this!
aquentinn 16 hours ago [-]
And the point of this comment is what? When did HN stop removing fluff comments?
elzbardico 21 hours ago [-]
I think the standard curricula doesn't spend the time it should spend on the historical period of the robber barons.
nbulka 18 hours ago [-]
I use File -> Save Page As ... does a good enough job, I just have to keep a folder on my computer.
avereveard 1 days ago [-]
Jokes on them all my gemini chat are youtube link I want a summary of
puttycat 1 days ago [-]
Joke on them all my Gemini chats are low-value questions I don't want to spend Claude tokens on
resters 1 days ago [-]
This probably explains why I see random google employees I've never met in my facebook "people you may know" feed.
croisillon 1 days ago [-]
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"
blubber 19 hours ago [-]
So we learn the difference between retail and business subscriptions.
realsarm 1 days ago [-]
Then people are totally fine puting all sort of private stuff in Notebooklm or Gemini notebook.
daqulalin 23 hours ago [-]
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profstasiak 22 hours ago [-]
They train on our code as well so they can replace us sooner
advenn 1 days ago [-]
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.
kinj28 1 days ago [-]
I don’t use Gemini at all. It also gives me sub optimal experience compared to other personal assistants
ConfusedDog 1 days ago [-]
Use a self-hosted chat app with paid-tier of API tokens.
whycome 1 days ago [-]
It's just keeping track of all the times you were mean
isityettime 24 hours ago [-]
I sure hope so. Gemini is useless garbage, and every time I'm mean to it is a case in point. It's by far the most frustrating of any LLM I've ever used.
ljlolel 21 hours ago [-]
it’s all trained. that’s why i made trustedrouter so that it can be end to end encrypted ai chats
okdood64 22 hours ago [-]
Aren't they all like that?
reasonableklout 21 hours ago [-]
No, most of the products today like Claude Code / Chat allow you to opt-out of training without also disabling important features like chat history.
ozgung 18 hours ago [-]
I’m disappointed it is not common knowledge that:
1- In Google/Gemini/Antigravity there is no “opt-out” (without making the service completely unusable). Your code/data is directly in their training set.
2- Others have partial “opt-out”. They can still read your chat history, run models on them, probably indirectly train some internal models.
frevib 1 days ago [-]
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.
rheisen_ 22 hours ago [-]
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
jay_kyburz 17 hours ago [-]
Does this mean that if I take the time to correct an AI and show it how its wrong, later training data will include the correction?
That would be quite good actually.
Right now when the AI wrong I don't bother to correct it, I just open an new chat and change topics.
jay_kyburz 17 hours ago [-]
I guess that leads to the next question, how does Google filter for quality when including other user chat? They wont want the training poisoned by all the dumb shit people argue with AI about.
EbNar 1 days ago [-]
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.
whiteboardr 1 days ago [-]
May I ask where you subscribed instead and why it is better and more secure there?
EbNar 24 hours ago [-]
Well, I know it's likely self-delusion, but ChatGPT has an "improve models for everyone" switch event if the history is not switched off. Plus, at least it doesn't forget the context of the chat every 2 messages. For now.
hosteur 1 days ago [-]
Never trust google.
elzbardico 21 hours ago [-]
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.
xyst 22 hours ago [-]
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.
taspeotis 1 days ago [-]
If it’s not an iPhone it’s … not an iPhone.
bethekidyouwant 24 hours ago [-]
You guys must be joking if you don’t want the AI to get better stop using it. NIMBY for your precious chat logs.
dzonga 1 days ago [-]
we already knew this - google is gonna google - same way they train on your google photos and emails.
jbrooks84 1 days ago [-]
Every AI trains on the input given to it
Havoc 1 days ago [-]
This is false.
eg Gemini enterprise has a note under each chat session explicitly saying it’s not used to improve the models
wat10000 1 days ago [-]
ZDR policies are a thing. Maybe you can't trust all of them, but when a provider like AWS says it, you can probably believe them. They'd be setting themselves up for an endless stream of massive lawsuits from other large companies if they were lying about it.
Local models are also a thing. The Qwen 3.8 I'm running on a spare computer is definitely not training on my inputs.
leafingensemble 20 hours ago [-]
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Zeruxe 1 days ago [-]
Scary!
officeplant 22 hours ago [-]
>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 :)
zodwick 1 days ago [-]
why am i not suprised
j45 12 hours ago [-]
This is a pretty disappointing thing to read.
r_lee 1 days ago [-]
another Google W I guess? gemini really leading the pack over here
Aachen 1 days ago [-]
W I?
ForHackernews 1 days ago [-]
"...Google W[in,] I guess..."
tonyhart7 1 days ago [-]
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 ????
LoboxPlatform 5 hours ago [-]
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StanislavPetrov 1 days ago [-]
We should all be writing bots that constantly spam all of these so-called AIs with random nonsense to poison the well.
Aachen 1 days ago [-]
Ah yes, the poison-the-product-you're-trying-to-use strategy
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...
Imagine all those tasty confidential IP and contract documents they have ingested. You couldn’t buy those.
For an AI system to be “completely safe”, like a self-driving car, it must map the full environment it operates in and be taught the “right way” to handle every conceivable scenario.
So when you present it with novel data or a situation, that constitutes an “AI safety event”, which per their ToS is a carve out for training on your session.
Further, go read the ToS carefully about what you opt out of. You’ll note there’s nary a mention of tool calls. You’re only opting out inputs (what you type) and outputs from the model from being trained on. All the content of the tool calls made while running on your system are fair game for training.
Can you please expand on what you believe RL looks like in this context?
It’s literally just complicating things and providing zero reassurance to us AI customers.
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!
Google has this pattern of all or nothing approach.
Maps refuses to show your *current* location if you don't enable location accuracy i.e. if you won't allow it to spy on your WiFi or Bluetooth it refuses to show your current location at all. GPS, what's that?
We can disable notifications and even phone access but physical activity is the one permission that cannot be disabled for play services !?
Google apps have a lot of WTFs!
There's no reason they can't have a mix of "this is popular in general" and "your subs and likes suggest you'd like this" on the front page - they just don't want people to disable watch history. They are required to offer that as an option, but they'll never stop pestering you about it.
That one I do like. YouTube’s homepage (at least without an account and with history off) is a cesspool of uninteresting clickbait garbage so I’m glad to have it off. I do agree they seem to think of it as some kind of punishment¹, which makes it all the more satisfying that it works as I want it.
¹ It’s now entirely blank for me, but I remember when they started doing this (it wasn’t always the case) they showed a message that suggested not having a homepage was undesirable.
Imagine if you go to Google.com to do a web search, and it is a page full of recommendations on sites to visit. Would you want that?
Sandboxed Play Services works on Grapheneos without physical activity so it's definitely not actually required by their services.
But I think they showed the best example of that behavior just recently: no AI, no Google search for students because search is "too integrated" with AI (https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2026/11/03/google-...)
Create an API key linked to your billing info
I found out later that Goog411 was created to primarily train on the voice prompts from the users of the service. Left a really bad taste.
There are though some more privacy friendly alternatives that I remember from playing with GrapheneOS settings.
And on phones. In my experience, a hot start fix (with up to date ephemeris) shouldn't take more than a couple seconds. Maybe you have a bad antenna.
Then again, anon YouTube no longer showing recommendations on the start page is what waned me off the website.
Call it what it is, please. User-hostile behaviour that compels you to turn their tracking on if you want to use any of the practically helpful services.
I'm a super privacy conscious person, and even I end up keeping many of these things on simply because I want to use for eg google assistant.
They are not transparent about it either. Anything you link to it to enable basic functionality you had on device before gets them the ability to use it for not just training but ads and measurement.
Thanks for the reminder OP!
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.
And this goes for all cloud providers btw.
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?
Literally the opposite. People don't read privacy policies, even ones designed to be readable.
The privacy policy says it grabs everything, and there's nothing that says they'll stop just because you pay them.
Wasn’t that just people misunderstanding incognito as making you private to websites as opposed to private on your own computer (no data persisted locally)? Or are you thinking of something different?
The numbers are meaningfully smaller than that, and decrease even more when the banners are compliant (i.e. as easy to reject all as it is to accept all).
https://justanalytics.app/blog/cookie-consent-statistics-202...
> 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.
But there's two reasons to bring cautionary attention to it anyway:
1. As a user, I may not be okay with those terms as they stand and may not have the legal insight to have intuited them. In as much as I have a choice, because of those terms, I may want to use Gemini less/differently or look at other providers that have crafted less shrewd and defensive legalese and processes.
2. As a executive or manager at Google, whether working directly in feature management, or advertising, or government compliance, these same terms define the framework for anything I want to develop. What "makes sense" from a defensive legal standpoint today can the open door for an exploitative or otherwise unexpected use later.
I get what you're saying here in terms of plausible or justifiable "innocence", but that probably shouldn't get in the way of some critical personal reflection for users.
> 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...
Some important things to take away from this:
* They’re claiming to use chat transcripts for both training and for human review to improve training, not just for liability.
* They don’t define “subset”. It could be most chats.
* They make no promises of anonymizing content, just “disconnecting” it from the account.
* This is happening for free and paid user subscriptions, by default, and the only way to stop it is to turn off chat history altogether.
Don't care for what, store it away audit save if you have to, talk to laywers in case you need to read through them but don't let random people read my stuff.
And in this case stuff = AI discussion which feels to me similiar to my google docs documents im hoping/expecting Google also to not read
This doesn’t make sense. In such cases data could be reviewed by court order. That’s not something you’d have to agree to in tos.
But this would require an admission of limitations of the technology.
Do people sue Google if search links to a page that has misleading info that results in someone taking a wrong drug? Nope.
Do we sue the browser maker when the info on a given Web page is malicious? Also no.
So, I don't understand why we treat chatbot providers any different. Everyone should be expected not to believe a word they say without corroboration.
Some chats are saved for 14-30 days IF they trigger a safety classifier, but they are never used to train future models or retained after that period, the objective is to verify safety. Simple as that.
If you are a business user, like in the case of Azure OpenAI, the analysis and priorities are quite different though, but the mechanism seems to be the same.
The primary purpose has always been improving search overall -- traditionally this has meant updating query interpretation, ranking, presentation, etc for smaller and smaller query slices ("Ah, when we show the mayor and the population in response to [Barcelona] people just revise their query to [Barcelona FC], so we should make sure to include latest match result on the top. Not so for [New York]."), and running tests on every product change to see what people like. In this case nobody cares about any _individual_ user's data, only the collective. This is basically the original "collective intelligence" contract of PageRank, albeit hillclimbing on billions of searches and clicks instead of using link structure. (Old question: does original PageRank count as machine learning, or not?)
Second is personalization -- things like "Oh, my flight or my delivery is expected on date X, handy that gmail popped a reminder on my calendar, good work Google." Or searching for a restaurant in Maps and seeing results that are biased towards the kinds of restaurants you already like, that kind of thing.
When it comes to revenue the purpose of these isn't to target ads, it's just to have you get value from and use the product, and when you are ready to spend money this is where you come to search for the thing, whatever it is.
Finally there is limited use of a limited set of data for ads relevance. There's higher CPC for ads you might actually be interested in (and if you are looking to spend money, is finding a willing seller who has compelling terms via an ad such a bad thing?) But ad revenue is mostly downstream of users being satisfied with the core product and using it more, whatever that product is. (Search, Maps, AI chat, etc)
(Bonus. My Search pro tip re: ads is leverage the modern stack and spell out your intent with a few more words when you query. We're pretty good at not serving ads for non-commercial queries. But old-school super short "searchese" queries make it hard to guess whether your intent is commercial or not.)
It is actually, but the shady part is that this is not (just) to target ads to you, though that certainly happens… it is, as OP explained, so that they can better capture query intent AND your behavior (clicks, dwell time, subsequent searches, etc) that they then use to refine and rerank search results, which improves Google Search and keeps you using it, which becomes a virtuous flywheel that competitors can’t catch up to.
One way for competitors to break through is to buy traffic, but well Google blocked that too by using its monopoly profits to pay more than anybody else (Apple and Mozilla search deals.)
All of this came out in the Search Antitrust trial. Look up NavBoost for instance.
That is what I believed, a long time ago, too. At this point I'd say this kind of thinking falls somewhere between idealistic and naive on a spectrum.
If better search were indeed the goal, we would have had better search a long time ago. But we don't. In fact, search gets worse over time, devolving into an ad-ridden mess freely gamed by SEO content farms, and now with a dumb-but-cheap-AI cherry on top.
That just blocks your own view.
Can anybody recommend a good Swype¹ keyboard that is not G-board?
Old Swype+Dragon is dead.
Google regularly removes words they don't like from my dictionary. For example swear words, or today, I had to re-type GrapheneOS.
AD 1: By Swype I mean writing on Android by dragging my finger through the letters making up the words I want to type.
I also miss being able to easily use ctrl+c,x,v or easily entering space or other special characters, using special gestures.
There is just so many FOSS keyboards, that it's hard to choose from them. And I hope somebody with similar usage patterns could share what they are using.
I don't think people understand that while consumers are dumb, uneducated, and broke, enterprise is a cash cow with a experts and a legal team.
If you serve them, like Google does on a massive scale, these ToS "gotchas" will do you in faster than you can say "lawsuit".
six months later
Quietly update the ToS to allow them to retroactively use all of your history and data going forward, attempt to fly under the radar and/or gaslight users that it's always been that way
You’d maybe want to counter with something like 'But Google/Amazon/whoever just wants to sell me stuff!'. What makes you think that Chinese B2C would just pass on that opportunity?
I also don’t know that I agree with your idea that manipulation is a greater risk from foreign actors. You're right to point out that it can be a problem from either, but local actors have a particularly direct incentive to shape the opinions and behavior of the population whose views affect their own power and interests. I would not argue that means foreign actors are harmless, I just don't agree they are necessarily worse either.
Just like how Kim Jong Un killed his brother using dumb pawns to actually carry out the murder.
So if your head has not grasped this reality, then they are already two steps ahead of your "What could they possibly do".
This is also the reason why congress keeps banning Chinese enterprise. It's not because they care about privacy, it's because they care about people being turned into pawns.
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 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.
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.
actually even gemma locally is great for a lot of chat purposes.
1- In Google/Gemini/Antigravity there is no “opt-out” (without making the service completely unusable). Your code/data is directly in their training set.
2- Others have partial “opt-out”. They can still read your chat history, run models on them, probably indirectly train some internal models.
That would be quite good actually.
Right now when the AI wrong I don't bother to correct it, I just open an new chat and change topics.
Of course they have been using our data all this time.
Privacy at big tech is a facade.
eg Gemini enterprise has a note under each chat session explicitly saying it’s not used to improve the models
Local models are also a thing. The Qwen 3.8 I'm running on a spare computer is definitely not training on my inputs.
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 :)
also the same cases for antrophic and open ai
why would anyone trust company that literally need data to improve their product ????