What is happening?
According to a post trending on Hacker News, Google uses the Gemini chat history of personal Google AI subscribers to train its AI models. The post stresses that a paid subscription does not exempt users from this.
What Google's own documents say
Google's Gemini support pages state that when the 'Keep Activity' setting is on, Gemini app activity is used to improve Google services, including training generative AI models. The documents also say a subset of chats is reviewed by human reviewers and that these chats are retained for up to three years even if the user deletes their activity.
What users can do
The only way to stop the training use is to turn off 'Keep Activity' in Gemini's settings. But doing so means chat sessions are lost after 72 hours. Temporary chat sessions are also offered as a way to stay outside training.
Why it matters
The poster says they assumed a paid subscription would keep them from 'becoming the product' and learned this too late. Google also explicitly warns users not to enter confidential information into chats.
