"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.
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.
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?
They're supposed to be focused on genuine training improvements over existing data, including via RL. Gathering data under the table is misaligned behavior.
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 !?
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.
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.
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".
> 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.
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!"
I know this idea is over the head of probably 75% of people, so forgive me if this is too dense to understand, but "full payment" is the sum of all forms of payment (usually a combo of data, ads, and money). The seller of a product/service is the one who determines the payment component ratios, and the buyers decide if they want it or not. This applies to everything from streaming services, to app subscriptions, to TV sales.
So while true that you are giving money to Google, it is also true that you are paying the rest of the "full payment" with your data.
Google offers the option to pay the "full payment" with only money too. But often companies do not, and only offer other ratios of "full payment".
Don't feel bad for not grasping this, seemingly everyone else is unable to get it without having it spelled out.
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!
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.
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.
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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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!
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 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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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 :(
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.
”
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I know this idea is over the head of probably 75% of people, so forgive me if this is too dense to understand, but "full payment" is the sum of all forms of payment (usually a combo of data, ads, and money). The seller of a product/service is the one who determines the payment component ratios, and the buyers decide if they want it or not. This applies to everything from streaming services, to app subscriptions, to TV sales.
So while true that you are giving money to Google, it is also true that you are paying the rest of the "full payment" with your data.
Google offers the option to pay the "full payment" with only money too. But often companies do not, and only offer other ratios of "full payment".
Don't feel bad for not grasping this, seemingly everyone else is unable to get it without having it spelled out.
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.
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.
Thanks for the reminder OP!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.)
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.
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.
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
Of course they have been using our data all this time.
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.
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.
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.
Privacy at big tech is a facade.
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 :)
actually even gemma locally is great for a lot of chat purposes.
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.
also the same cases for antrophic and open ai
why would anyone trust company that literally need data to improve their product ????