YHK - yet another hacker news clone

132 points jameslk 2 hours ago 41 comments

If you have a personal Google AI subscription, all your saved chat history in Gemini can be used for training and there is no way to opt out unless you turn off chat history or use temporary chat sessions. These chat transcripts may even be read by human reviewers. Although Google claims to disconnect them from your account when human-reviewed, they explicitly warn not to enter confidential information.

https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/16836988

“[Gemini app activity] is used to improve Google services for everyone, including by training generative AI models, if your Keep Activity setting is on.“

https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/13594961?hl=en#human_review

“A subset of chats are reviewed by human reviewers”

https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/13594961?hl=en#pn_retain_data

“Chats reviewed by human reviewers [...] are not deleted when you delete your activity. Instead, they are retained for up to three years.”

https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/13594961?hl=en#pn_data_usage

“Please don’t enter confidential information that you wouldn’t want a reviewer to see or Google to use to improve our services, including machine-learning technologies.”

To disable their training on your chat sessions, you need to turn off “Keep Activity” in Gemini’s settings. Turning that off means you’ll lose any chat sessions after 72 hours.

I learned this too late, thinking that having a paid subscription = not being turned into the product. Apparently paying is not enough.

Thank you to this user on HN for mentioning in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50355424

r_lee 2 hours ago | parent

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

Aachen 1 hour ago | parent

W I?

ForHackernews 1 hour ago | parent

"...Google W[in,] I guess..."

icantevenhold 2 hours ago | parent

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

2III7 1 hour ago | parent

Obviously anthropic are doing this. Hence their "don't insult Claude too much" policy.

233mhz 2 hours ago | parent

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

usern20260720 1 hour ago | parent

every thing you read, every keycap you press. Every mail you read, every call you make, permanently recording you

frereubu 1 hour ago | parent

You'll never play that at a wedding.

nicce 1 hour ago | parent

OpenAI chat sends everything when you type. Better edit the prompt elsewhere.

finger 1 hour ago | parent

Even before pressing enter? What would be the reason for that? Faster responses?

nicce 1 hour ago | parent

Predicting autocomplete for the prompt. They do suggest the remaining of the prompt. Not sure if that is the main purpose.

dgellow 17 minutes ago | parent

And just general tracking/analytics

dgellow 18 minutes ago | parent

It’s a terrible way to live. We built and are building such an anti-human society

wewewedxfgdf 1 hour ago | parent

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

kuboble 1 hour ago | parent

For daily chat gemini is great.

actually even gemma locally is great for a lot of chat purposes.

Haven880 55 minutes ago | parent

Their recent Argon is weak as well. But then they promise Carbon going to be world changing. Yeah sure.

StanislavPetrov 1 hour ago | parent

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

Aachen 1 hour ago | parent

Ah yes, the poison-the-product-you're-trying-to-use strategy

croisillon 1 hour ago | parent

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"

realsarm 1 hour ago | parent

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

fweimer 1 hour ago | parent

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.

whycome 1 hour ago | parent

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

advenn 1 hour ago | parent

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.

viraptor 1 hour ago | parent

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.

jameslk 1 hour ago | parent

> 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.

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.

frevib 1 hour ago | parent

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.

jbrooks84 1 hour ago | parent

Every AI trains on the input given to it

Havoc 58 minutes ago | parent

This is false.

eg Gemini enterprise has a note under each chat session explicitly saying it’s not used to improve the models

richrichardsson 1 hour ago | parent

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 17 minutes ago | parent

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!

Zeruxe 1 hour ago | parent

Scary!

EbNar 58 minutes ago | parent

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.

Haven880 57 minutes ago | parent

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 43 minutes ago | parent

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?

jwr 53 minutes ago | parent

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.

dgellow 15 minutes ago | parent

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

hosteur 44 minutes ago | parent

Never trust google.

avereveard 36 minutes ago | parent

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

puttycat 22 minutes ago | parent

Joke on them all my Gemini chats are low-value questions I don't want to spend Claude tokens on

Tryvrsakjo10 16 minutes ago | parent

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.

devsda 8 minutes ago | parent

> 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.