It's right there in the privacy center. The answer is quite unambiguously yes by the way. (This is for the Gemini app):

"How your data is used Google uses this data, as described in our Privacy Policy, to:

Provide our services Maintain and improve our services Develop new services Personalise our services (learn more) Customise our services Communicate with you Measure performance Protect Google, our users and the public

These uses extend to the generative AI models and other machine-learning technologies powering our services."

We had legal trying to figure out if data submitted to Google Cloud was shared with Google, and the conclusion was that it is unclear from their TOS. Their TOS is a bunch of circular references to different agreements.

I think it goes without saying that anything Google provides for free, they do it to garner user data. Traditional search is dying. And so is the advertising that comes with it. They are finding alternatives. They'll keep "injecting" themselves into everything we use regularly. Ads will get even more targeted... much more contextual in realtime.

They are definitely capable of writing such statements, which you can see in their enterprise products. In my Google Workspace gemini app it says pretty prominently and clearly:

  Your [ORGNAME] chats aren’t used to improve our models

So they definitely understand that people want to hear that their data isn't being used for training, and they know how to say it clearly and reassuringly. Which makes the omission of that in their consumer products more telling in my view.

So, naive question: If you click this button while looking at your bank account or, say, a mortgage application form, or a government website where you're paying taxes, etc... is all your form input literally just sucked into some insecure dataset in the cloud used for training Gemini?

I think if Google trained current models on private data, confidential info would leak constantly, it would be an absolute trainwreck. If Gemini leaked your Gmail and Chrome activity, Google would get sued and regulated into oblivion.

But Google needs to leave this option open in the future, in case they have to go all-in on an arms-race against China, if Chinese AI starts becoming an actual threat somehow. And it's easy to predict the USA gov would prioritize that race over privacy concerns.

For what it's worth, these are the current conditions under which it will be active:

* Be 18 or over and in the US.

* Use a Mac or Windows computer.

* Use the latest version of Chrome.

* Have Chrome’s language set to English (United States).

* Sign(ed) in to Chrome.

This is literally the worst part of Gemini. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out if, and if so what, they are training on even with my stupid $250/mo subscription. It's totally opaque.

being privacy centric is a badge of honor these days, so if they aren't making it clear or not giving an easy to find option, then it's a guaranteed to your queries and outputs are used for training.

Or course they are using it. With Google even this keyboard stroke on Android is used for something.

Google generally uses data from free users to train ML models etc., but no data from paying customers. I don't have a link to back it up though.

They do, even when you pay for gemini pro/ultra.

they obvuscate it with legal nonsense

> Quite literally just gemini.google.com in an iFrame.

Hmm, no? It has access to all of the content of all of you're currently open tabs, and is able to parse images on web pages as well.

It would be neat if it could also browse on your behalf, but that would present all kinds of security risks.

> So you click a button, it pops open a text box in a floating window, you type in a question, and the AI replies. This is the most underwhelming implementation of browser-based AI that they could have come up with. Quite literally just gemini.google.com in an iFrame.

Well, they're gonna have to support an astronomical scale of queries - not many companies in the world are able to do it and Alphabet is doing it pretty much on their own stack of cloud, a.i chips and software. So sure, the front end is not a big deal but this is still a big move.

It has access to the current page, so you can ask Gemini questions about its content.

They took 1 step at a time instead of trying to take multiple steps at a time, how is that a bad thing. They're obviously getting things prep'd for Chrome agents and Gemini 3.

don't worry -- they have big plans!

https://research.google/blog/mechanism-design-for-large-lang...

I think it will be useful as a modernised ctrl+f

Left when they disabled uBlock Origin.

I was 60% Chrome and 40% Firefox, now I'm 99% Firefox and 1% Chromium.

you don't need to be logged in atm, AFAIK

An infinite number of people at an infinite number of computers will eventually be served the content they desire.

I’d assume one step further, that the human-centric web isn’t what’s served to you, it’s just generative content created on the fly to suit your mood.

Think TikTok, except where the platform is both curator and creator.

Or you will get the pages that are good enough to hold your attention, while being short form enough to keep giving you small constant dopamine hits. Nothing too interesting or too long, keeping you chasing more hits, to prevent you from feeling like you really "finished" something significant, since that might feel like a stopping place and cause you to go do something else.

I wouldn't gave a major problem with this if the algorithms were tuned to my benefit. In fact, I probably prefer it since most of the web is noise that I don't need to see. So the problem isn't algorithmic content, it's closed source algorithms designed to benefit the company that made them rather than the user.

Maybe, but that sounds a lot like Google Discover, which is part of Android, the Chrome new tab page and (sometimes?) the Google home page.

That's arguably not browsing the web, that's watching TV.

Nothing wrong with that, in theory and in moderation.

No, that doesn't make any sense, because the web is not a social media.

That’s the future if we leave it to the tech bros. As humans we can and should do better though.

i legitimately miss stumbleupon.

If I recall correctly, the main selling point of Firefox AI is that it's offline by default, which means that it doesn't rack up your token bill and doesn't expose your data.

> So I am not impressed by Google here

I imagine google has to build something that works for basically every kind of user out there, vs what you built. Moreover, it’s self obvious that they would support Gemini but not ollama, again given most users cannot run beefy LLMs on their consumer devices.

> It doesn’t browse for you

I would hope not

I saw the new before I sleep, and slepped peacefully. Because I'd already switched to brave 2 years ago. And once more to firefox 2 months ago. With firefox I feel I finally own my browser and no company is gonna push things down my throat I didn't first agree to

The danger with google is that they suck at user experience

Does Apple do this often? I've always wondered if iCloud is worth getting, given that it constantly spams me to use it with my iPhone

Wait, how does this footgun work?

Ah, the ol' Dropbox risk management tactic where they show you a random selection of your photos when you open the page. Or any page on the site. Suggested: "Remembering Summer Vacation 2020". By the way, do you want to compress your whole photo library to achieve Instagram quality while offering to consume more of the photos of your computer, disillusioned by the last few pennies of value that already fell. What's that? Your iCloud or Android device is out of space because the two ProRes videos your iPhone took after the commercial convinced the Apple user to engage the Apple proprietary video encoding button to maximize their Instagram engagement. The Samsung folds itself into a rolly-polly bug shell form. Eventually, all of your photos will be sent to Instagram, the final destination. Once there, after compressing your photos without asking, they will insist on your choosing ZSTD as the coffin.

So, on the consent-quality-useful triangle (WIP), Google is clearly eliminating quality and consent to provide you with a useful interface to the Google consentless compression box. Just what everyone wanted. The future is now.

Notification: You have 2 new views (details button: 2 ad-consenting views, 0 other views) on the photo you took of the compression artifact on a video that you suspect Google might have accidentally compressed without your consent, confusing itself to be Instagram. Unfortunately, your comparison photo gets equally confused and is compressed to be equally as bad as the compressed one. Now the photos look identical, and you look like a conspiracy theorist tweeting about "video encoding" from your Sesame Street Elmo phone, just like everyone else, with no issue at all. "We're in the Ourobouros. Maybe Paramount isn't the issue. Maybe it's Paramount Plus." The Samsung rolly-polly bug interrupts and insists this issue will have to wait because it's 2pm on Friday. Now, your Elmo phone is now the only device still working in the office, as you try to convince your wife why you have to stay late, "Because you're different than the rest of the people posting compression artifact-laden photos."

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They just introduced endless nagging in AI Studio to enable Drive integration, if you disallowed it. They really want your data!

Ils avaient probablement dépassé leur quota de tokens pour faire traduire la page par Gemini...

It sounds like an alternative for passing a URL to a chat session, with the advantage that you could share web pages that require a log in.

But you might want to be careful about which web pages you share this way?

Right it felt pretty bad. It chugs tons of tokens just to be like "I need to scroll up!". Then 5 seconds later it scrolls up, chugs more tokens. "I need to scroll up more!"

It’s for Google to gain complete control of the context whereever you are on the Internet

My theory is that Google wants to bake Gemini into Chrome to preempt a future antitrust ruling ordering them to spin the browser out, for the same reason Microsoft made IE an integral part of Windows 98.

Use macOS or Linux, don’t use chrome. The are getting tinier everyday.

Much longer actually, Bing Chat in Edge came out more than 2+ years ago.

Count me in! Do you have one of those fancy things called „hubs“ or „switches“ or are we going BNC with terminators?

I have a D25 Laplink Cable somewhere and maybe even a copy of Netware 4.

Yep. Real "metaverse" energy.

What is LAN?

You need to do it via Gemini in Chrome in an updated Chrome install (roughly 140.0.7339.186 or newer) on Mac/Windows using the English language with the relevant permissions enabled in the sections under chrome://settings/ai

My guess is it's either the first part (doing it via Gemini in Chrome) or the last part (permissions enabled).

Stealing clicks? What obligation does Google have to send traffic to a site?

What does this mean for publishers and SEO, if AI starts answering questions directly in Chrome instead of sending traffic?

What do you think this will mean for OpenAI, Anthropic and their current valuations?

I bet the judge already realizes how mistaken he was to let them off. Now they'll use their monopoly product to ensure monopoly control in the new market he was so sure would rein them in.

Firefox/brave/orion/vivaldi/safari/librewolf/etc

Admittedly some of them have their own AI offerings but not as invasive and can actually be turned off.

chrome://settings/ai

Chromium has been building APIs to support fetching on device models so that Chrome can fetch Gemini-nano to run locally. I'm not familiar if nwjs has any plans to do something with that functionality or not though.

Chrome dev console has Gemini integrated as well. Otherwise pick any coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, opencode, ...) give it the Playwright MCP and ask away.

I’ll take that bet. You will be able to disable it but that won’t mean they won’t still run it.

I'll take that bet too. You will always be able to disable it by not using Chrome.

The problem with that is Google has burned so many bridges with users over the past couple of decades that moving off the ad model to some sort of paid subscription service is going to be next to impossible. People just don't trust Google any more. I know many people who happily pay OpenAI every month but wouldn't pay the same for Google Gemini even if it was better.

Not to mention that actually giving Google money for anything other than an in-app purchase is oddly hard work - try buying a Google business subscription and behold an interface worse than AWS's console. Google has so much catching up to do that it's conceivable that they'll eventually fail.

Summarizing a long article (possibly in a language I don't speak), querying it for specific information without having to come up with an exact greppable substring etc. is absolute what web browsers are for.

I feel like we are past that point now. The fact that AI will get things wrong has been normalized already

Gilfoyle will sort that

> Next, coming to a fridge near you! /s

Well, with Samsung forcing ads on their "smart" fridges [0], Google + AI can't be far behind.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292666

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