I’ve also been getting excellent tips for books, shows, clothes and travel. Just this week, it’s been exceptional for planning our upcoming spring break. By analyzing our family’s interests and past trips in Gmail and Photos, it skipped the tourist traps. Instead, it suggested an overnight train journey and specific board games we could play along the way.
How it works, and our approach to privacy
We built Personal Intelligence with privacy at the center. Connecting your apps is off by default: you choose to turn it on, decide exactly which apps to connect, and can turn it off anytime.
When enabled, Gemini accesses your data to answer your specific requests and to do things for you. And because this data already lives at Google securely, you don’t have to send sensitive data elsewhere to start personalizing your experience. This is a key differentiator.
You also won’t have to guess where an answer comes from: Gemini will try to reference or explain the information it used from your connected sources so you can verify it. If it doesn’t, you can ask it for more information. And if a response feels off, just correct it on the spot (“Remember, I prefer window seats”). You can also easily regenerate responses without personalization for a particular chat, or use temporary chats to have a conversation without personalization.
We also have guardrails for sensitive topics. Gemini aims to avoid making proactive assumptions about sensitive data like your health, though it will discuss this data with you if you ask.
Our goal is to improve your experience while keeping your data secure and under your control. Built with privacy in mind, Gemini doesn’t train directly on your Gmail inbox or Google Photos library. We train on limited info, like specific prompts in Gemini and the model’s responses, to improve functionality over time.
Here’s what this means in my minivan example. The photos of our road trip, the license plate picture in Photos and the emails in Gmail are not directly used to train the model. They are referenced to deliver the reply. We train the model with things like my specific prompts and responses, only after taking steps to filter or obfuscate personal data from the conversation I have with Gemini. In short, we don’t train our systems to learn your license plate number; we train them to understand that when you ask for one, we can locate it.
You can read more about our privacy approach here. At any time, you can adjust settings, disconnect Google apps, or delete your chat history.
