Change These 5 Privacy Settings if Google’s AI Is Running You

If you use Google (and statistically speaking, you probably do), there’s a very good chance an artificial intelligence is watching you closer than you realize. In 2025, and continuing into 2026, Google quietly rolled out a wave of AI-powered features across its most popular products, including Gmail, Chrome, Android, Google Search, Maps, Drive, and more. Many of these features were turned on by default, with the ability to turn them off buried deep in layers of menus. The result is that millions of users are now unwittingly giving Google’s AI a detailed picture of their lives — their conversations, their photos, their voice recordings, their browsing habits, even their private emails — without ever consciously agreeing to it. Fortunately, if you know where to look, you have much more control than you think. If you want to regain some control over what Google’s AI knows about you, here are five privacy settings you should change right now.

Setting 1: Turn Off or Audit Gemini Apps Activity

The most significant change in your Google AI privacy toolkit is the one that determines how Gemini uses your conversations. When Gemini Apps Activity is enabled — and it is on by default — all the prompts you enter, files you upload, photos you share, questions you ask by voice, and transcripts from a Gemini Live session are saved to your account history. Google uses examples of this data to train its machine learning algorithms and improve its services. In some cases that activity is reviewed by human annotators, though Google says such reviews are anonymized. If you’d rather not have your interactions with Gemini fed back into its training pipeline, you’ll need to be deliberate.

When you’re signed in to your Google Account, you can control this setting on your Gemini Apps Activity page. Click the dropdown and select “Turn off” if the “Keep Activity” setting is on. Google will tell you this will remove your Gemini conversations from your Activity feed and your chat history, which also means you lose access to previous conversations. If you are relying on your chat history, another way to go about this is to leave the setting on and enable an automatic deletion timer (for example, delete activity every three months) so that Gemini can keep working on ongoing tasks but your data is not stored forever. Either way, this is the setting you can’t afford to ignore.

Setting 2: Disable New Search Services History

Google started to roll out a new setting in accounts called Search Services History in June 2026 that most users don’t know about. This is the default setting that powers advanced AI features across the Google ecosystem. It means we can store media you share during AI-powered interactions – photos you upload to visual search tools, voice clips you record during voice searches and real-time audio interactions, videos you submit for context, and other personal media you share while using Gemini and related services. Google says this information can be used to improve its services, and has various protections in place to limit the amount of personally identifiable information that can be tied to the data — but many users simply do not see the notion of photos, voice recordings and videos being stored and processed without their explicit awareness as a trade-off they would knowingly agree to.

Finding and disabling this setting requires some maneuvering. Go to your Google Account settings, click on the “Data & Privacy” tab, and scroll down to Activity Controls. Find the Search Services History section and disable it. It takes less than a minute, but the privacy implications of leaving it always on are big, especially as Google’s artificial intelligence systems get better and better at processing rich multimedia content in more depth and for a longer time.

Setting 3: Turn Off Gemini’s Memory and Personal Intelligence Features

In late 2025 Google rolled out a memory feature for Gemini globally and made it the default setting. The feature builds a cumulative profile of you, pulling in your previous conversations: your preferences, your interests, your habits, your professional background, and any personal details that have surfaced in previous chats. The idea is that Gemini will become more of a personalized assistant over time, but there are big privacy implications. If you have ever asked Gemini to help you with writing a CV, drafting a sensitive email, discussing a health concern or working through a personal decision, that information may well already be part of the profile it has built up about you.

You can view this feature and change it by opening the Gemini app or web interface. Tap Settings & Help, then Personal Intelligence. Here is the memory switch If it’s on you can switch it off. You can also ask Gemini directly what it currently remembers about you, or go to Gemini Settings and choose Activity, where a history of your prompts, files and photos shared with the AI is kept. You can delete specific conversations or use Temporary Chat mode for sensitive questions. Conversations in temporary mode are not saved in your chat history, are not used to train Gemini, and do not personalize your experience. If you don’t want an AI to remember something forever, temporary mode is the way to go.

Setting 4: Stop Google from Saving Your Voice and Visual Search Data

The Web & App Activity controls within Google — the central hub that controls most of what Google collects about your behavior — include two sub-settings that deserve special mention in the AI era: voice and audio activity, and visual search history. The voice and audio sub-setting controls whether or not Google saves recordings of your “Hey Google” commands, voice searches, and real-time voice interactions. Google keeps the recordings as audio snippets in your account, and the company says it does so to improve speech recognition. But by 2026, Google’s speech recognition is already so good that many users see little personal value in contributing their voice snippets to the effort.

The visual search sub-setting is equally telling. When you use Google Lens, Circle to Search or any of the camera-powered features to identify an object, translate a text, scan a product or analyze an image, by default, that photo is saved to your history. Unlike a text search query, a photo taken in a personal context can accidentally capture faces, medical information, financial documents, or other highly private content you never intended to store in any online account. If you want to turn off both of these sub-settings, go to your Google Account, click Data & Privacy, then click into Web & App Activity and toggle off “Include voice and audio activity” and “Include visual search history” separately. You could also completely switch off the parent Web & App Activity toggle, but this will greatly reduce the functionality of Google’s personalized services.

Setting 5: Limit Gemini to Gmail, Drive and Google Workspace

The integration of Google’s AI into Gmail, Google Drive and the broader Workspace suite has perhaps been the most invasive expansion of the technology in recent memory. Google has started to roll out Gemini features by default on these products to most users in the US through 2025 and into 2026. This will allow the AI to break down emails, draft responses, analyze documents, and access the entire breadth of your Workspace content to provide personalized suggestions. In late 2025, a class-action lawsuit alleged Google surreptitiously turned on these features and was using Gmail content, including private messages and attachments, to fuel AI capabilities without explicit consent from users. Google has said that Gmail data is not used directly to train its Gemini AI model, but does admit that the data does pass through Gemini for personalization features such as summarization and drafting help.

Whether or not that distinction hits your personal privacy threshold is at your disposal, but it does require navigating what privacy researchers have called a deliberately layered opt-out process. In Gmail, click Settings, then click “See all settings.” Under General, you’ll see options for “Smart features and personalization.” If you turn off smart features in Gmail, Gemini won’t be able highlight content, generate drafts or personalize experiences using your Workspace data. Note that this toggle comes packed with other features like spellcheck and Smart Compose, so you might lose some conveniences along with the AI data access. The process is also app-specific for Google Drive and Google Docs as well, as Google doesn’t provide any single universal toggle to disconnect Gemini from all Workspace apps simultaneously.

Why This is More Important Now Than Ever

It is tempting to dismiss these settings as minor technical details with little practical impact on daily life. But the scope and sophistication of Google’s AI infrastructure makes that dismissal more and more difficult to defend. Google gathers behavioral data on approximately 92 percent of internet users, via its sprawling constellation of services including Search, Chrome, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, and advertising systems. Its artificial intelligence (AI) systems are designed to synthesize that data into increasingly granular and predictive models of individual behavior. Research has shown that search patterns alone can predict anxiety disorders with remarkable accuracy, and that behavioral data can reveal psychological traits and vulnerabilities that individuals would not willingly disclose.

The privacy settings discussed here are not a complete answer to that reality, and it would be dishonest to pretend they are. Google’s standard artificial intelligence systems are still running at an infrastructure level where individual toggles only partially address things. But this does not make these settings blank. Each is a tangible limit on a particular kind of data collection — a reduction in what is stored, held on to and fed back into systems that are ever more woven into the fabric of daily life. Where Google defaults are the norm and opting out takes a concerted effort, the work to audit and reconfigure these settings is one of the most pragmatic acts of digital self-determination available to the average user in the here and now.

Conclusion

Google’s AI isn’t something from the future coming down the pipeline — it’s baked into the software you use every morning to check your email, get to work, find information, and talk to your friends and family. It’s become a necessary modern literacy to understand what those tools gather, how they use it and where the off switches are. The five settings discussed in this article – Gemini Apps Activity, Search Services History, Gemini Memory, voice and visual search data, and Gmail and Workspace AI access – are not exhaustive, but they are the most impactful places to start. Look over them, tweak them to reflect your actual preferences and check back on them regularly, because Google updates its settings regularly and defaults tend to quietly reset to more data, not less. Digital privacy is not a one-time decision in the modern era of AI. It’s a continuing thing.