The largest tech giant, Google, has made significant changes to its privacy policy that directly affect the privacy of millions of users. The company has officially gained the right to store and use personal media files to train and improve its artificial intelligences.

This innovation was introduced through a hidden update to the Search services terms. While Google refers to this in newsletters as a step towards "greater control over history and personalization," in practice, users were automatically enrolled in an expanded data collection program.

What exactly is Google collecting?

The new policy covers not only classic search but also a wide ecosystem of services. Now, the following are subject to data collection:

  • Google Lens: photos and screenshots uploaded for visual search (including the Circle to Search feature) are now stored on the company's servers.
  • Google Translate: audio recordings of your voice made during pronunciation practice or translation are used as training material.
  • Voice Search and Search Live: all spoken queries and conversation transcripts are saved to improve speech recognition.
  • Other services: data also concerns Maps, Shopping, flight search, hotels, and news.

Google's help documentation confirms that saved media files are necessary for the development of generative AI models and security systems. Furthermore, the company acknowledged that collected files may be viewed not only by algorithms but also by real people — third-party expert reviewers.

Why is this happening now?

Experts link this move to the fact that open information on the internet for training neural networks is gradually being exhausted. Giants like Google and Meta are forced to move to the mass collection of content created by users within closed platforms and smart gadgets.

Previously, users could control history saving through a single general switch called "Web & App Activity." However, Google found a workaround: now this option is split into two independent parts. Search data has been moved to a separate menu, which is activated by default. This means that even if you had disabled general web activity tracking, the new media file collection for AI could have been running on your account unnoticed.

How to protect your data?

Users have the ability to revoke permission for information collection and regain control over their data. To do this, you need to perform the following actions in your Google account settings:

  1. Go to the My Activity page.
  2. Open the new section "Search Services History".
  3. Find the nested item "Save Media" and uncheck it. If desired, you can completely turn off the general Search Services History switch.
  4. In the same menu, configure the automatic data deletion function, choosing the period after which the system will clear the storage (3, 18, or 36 months).
  5. Go to the "Search Services Personalization" menu and turn off personalized recommendations so that your past queries do not affect search results and ad targeting.