Tell HN: Gemini trains on saved chat history even for paying subscribers, and opting out costs you your chats after 72 hours
- A personal Google AI subscription does not exempt Gemini chats from training: with Keep Activity on, app activity trains generative AI models, and the only opt-outs are turning the setting off or using temporary chats.
- Google states a subset of chats are read by human reviewers, and reviewed transcripts are not deleted when you delete activity, instead being retained for up to three years.
- Google's own help text tells users not to enter confidential information a reviewer might see, which undercuts the idea that paying for a subscription buys privacy.
- Disabling Keep Activity to opt out drops chat sessions after 72 hours, so history and training consent cannot both be avoided for personal accounts.
- A commenter reports that on Pixel phones Gemini stops performing basic tasks, including setting reminders, unless chat history is enabled.
Hacker News opinions
Is this really surprising to anyone? I assumed Google was hoovering up everything I type into its AI, so I don't tell it anything personal or sensitive.
People read privacy policies and believe them. It's like EU cookie banners, 99.9% of people just dismiss them and accept everything.
On a Pixel this is worse. I had the setting off, asked for a 7pm reminder, got 'OK, your reminder is set for 7pm', and the next day it told me it can't do anything with my phone unless I enable chat history.
Google has this all or nothing pattern. Maps won't show your current location at all if you don't let it scan WiFi and Bluetooth, even when GPS exists.
I assume every provider does this no matter what they say. It's too juicy a target to pass up.
I wouldn't go that far. When people found out the Grok CLI was uploading repos to the cloud despite the training toggle being off, there was a real backlash. Getting caught has a cost.
NotebookLM and Gemini notebooks are the bigger problem here. People dump all kinds of private material into those.
Even if they don't train on your content, Google's terms reserve the right to use it for creating new features and functionalities. The training exclusion has always been a distraction.
I don't trust any provider either, but you're reading the terms too hard. Human review is expected for threads that could make them liable, and keeping chats three years is for legal purposes.
It's wider than liability. Google says reviewed chats improve Gemini models and other generative AI, and they never define what 'subset' means. It could be most chats.
The mechanism is what bothers me. Azure OpenAI keeps safety-flagged chats 14 to 30 days to verify safety and never trains on them. Google could do the same and chooses not to.
I disabled it because of the human in the loop. Store it for an audit if you have to, but don't let random people read my chats. That feels the same as Google reading my Docs.
Gemini enterprise sessions carry a note saying they aren't used to improve the models, so no, not every AI trains on your input.
You can't opt out and keep your history. If you want to see your old chats, you're agreeing to human review and to training on them.