The changes reflect a broader shift in the industry: companies are now drawing data from users' everyday digital interactions.
Google is expanding the scope of data it collects through its search services, including images, files and audio recordings, which can also be used to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models.
The tech giant says that over the coming months it will gradually update the settings for Google Search services, which include Search, Maps, Shopping, Flights, Hotels, Translate and News.
The change was incorporated as an update to the privacy settings of Google's search services, from which, as the company emphasizes, users can opt out.
The platform can now store data such as users' search history, information from websites visited through its services, and responses from genetic AI. It can also include multimedia uploaded by users, such as "images, files, and audio and video recordings."
“Google also uses your history to provide, develop, and improve its services (for example, to train genetic AI models) and to protect Google, its users, and the public with the help of human reviewers,” the company said in its help documentation.
The changes reflect a broader shift in the industry towards seeking and leveraging real data from people's everyday interactions with digital services, rather than exclusively data collected from the web.
As for its AI competitors, OpenAI's help documentation states that data sharing is enabled by default for consumer accounts, but users can opt out, while Anthropic asks for explicit consent so that Claude can access users' conversations and programming sessions to improve its systems, unless users disable the setting.
Last year, Meta began using European users’ public social media posts “to help develop and improve artificial intelligence.” The company has also come under scrutiny for its use of content captured by its AI-powered glasses.
The practice of leveraging user activity to improve technology predates the explosion of genetic artificial intelligence.
Google's reCAPTCHA, for example, was previously used not only to block spam, but also to help digitize books and newspapers, asking users to identify words that computers had difficulty reading.
If you don't want Google to store your search data, you can change your preferences.
Users can turn off Search Services History or the Media Storage option separately from Search Services History in settings. Media Storage covers files and media uploaded through Google Search services, such as images, audio, and video recordings.
Users can also specify when stored data will be automatically deleted, choosing to delete after 3, 18, or 36 months.
Although the press releases will range from very select to rare, I said I'd pass...because sometimes the editors hide.
