Tell HN: Gemini trains on chat history, even for subscribers (personal accounts)

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!

> 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Use a self-hosted chat app with paid-tier of API tokens.

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.

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. ”

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.

I assume that everyone does this no matter what they say. Seems like too juicy a target

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.

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"

Jokes on them all my gemini chat are youtube link I want a summary of

Then people are totally fine puting all sort of private stuff in Notebooklm or Gemini notebook.

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.

It's just keeping track of all the times you were mean

Never trust google.

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.

It might matter if Gemini was good enough to use but its not - I only use ChatGPT and Claude.

Scary!

Every AI trains on the input given to it

We should all be writing bots that constantly spam all of these so-called AIs with random nonsense to poison the well.

another Google W I guess? gemini really leading the pack over here

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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?