Consider this a late public service announcement: Google recently made a quiet change to its privacy settings that now allows the company to store more of your personal data—including media like images, files, and audio and video recordings—to improve its artificial intelligence models. In simple terms, if you upload any media while using Google’s Search services, that content is now being used to train AI unless you actively opt out. This shift came through an under-the-radar update to Google’s Search services privacy settings, first announced in a customer email back in June. With this update, the company effectively opted users into broader AI training under the pretense of giving them more control over their saved history and personalized recommendations.

Google is now training on your media, too.

The update introduced two new settings: Search Services History and Personalized Recommendations. These allow you to decide how your activity is used to personalize your Google experience, as well as how long your web and app activity is saved. This change applies not just to Google Search itself, but also to other search services like Maps, Shopping, Flights, Hotels, Translate, and News. For example, when you use Google Lens to search visually by snapping a photo, that image may now be saved for AI training. Similarly, if you use the newer Search Live feature to search by voice in the Google app, those audio recordings could be saved, along with any other Google voice search. If you practice speaking using Google Translate, that audio is also retained. These changes reflect a broader industry trend of gathering data by any means necessary to improve AI services. Rather than relying solely on web-scraped information, Google and other companies are increasingly collecting data that people upload or create while using their services. Meta is another example of a consumer tech company doing this at scale, training its AI on users’ images and media, as well as on content captured by its AI glasses. Google directly confirms this media-training use in its customer email: “Like your Search Services History, your saved media is also used to develop and improve Google services and technologies, including AI models and safety measures.” Its help documentation echoes this, stating that the company “uses your history to provide, develop, and improve its services (such as training generative AI models) and to protect Google, its users, and the public with the help of human reviewers.” Some of this storage is temporary and tied to making the product work, but according to Google’s own language, saved media can also be retained specifically to train its AI.

Adjusting your settings

The good news is that you do have some control. You can change your preferences on the Search Services History and Search Services Personalization pages. On the former, you can uncheck the “Save Media” box separately from the “Search Services History” box, or uncheck both. You can also configure how often you want saved data automatically deleted—after 3 months, 18 months, or 36 months. From there, you can jump to this page to explore other privacy settings, including Web & App Activity, Timeline, YouTube History, and more.

Beyond saved media, Google also uses your search history, location, and other information from websites you visit to personalize your experience on Google, including which ads are shown. Before this update, Google let you configure what historical search data was saved through its “Web & App Activity” settings. That has now been split into two: the Web & App Activity data and the new Search data setting, which is turned on by default. This means that if you previously changed your Web & App Activity data retention settings to opt out of having your data stored, that update will no longer affect your use of Google Search services, since it is now a separate option.