Paying for Google's Gemini does not stop Google from using your chats to train its AI models. That is the uncomfortable discovery at the centre of a Hacker News thread that shot past 500 upvotes on November 4, after a subscriber realised that the only way to opt out of training is to give up keeping a chat history at all.

The thread points to Google's own documentation, the Gemini Apps Privacy Hub, which states the position plainly. With the "Keep Activity" setting switched on — the default for adult users — your Gemini activity is used "to provide, develop, and improve its services (including training generative AI models)". And the terms apply identically to free users and to paying subscribers on Google AI Pro and Ultra plans. Paying, in other words, buys you features, not privacy.

The opt-out that deletes your memory

Google does offer a way out, but it is a blunt one. Turning off Keep Activity means future chats will not be used to train its models. The catch is that the same switch controls whether your conversations are saved at all. With it off, chats are deleted after 72 hours, wiping the assistant's long-term memory of your conversations, projects and preferences.

Temporary Chats offer a narrower escape: those sessions are not used for training either, but they vanish when the session ends. There is no middle setting — no way to keep a searchable history while telling Google not to train on it. As the Hacker News poster put it, if you want your previous chats to stay visible to you, you cannot also opt out of training and review. Google has not announced any plan to add a separate opt-out toggle.

Humans may read your chats — and keep them for years

Training is not the only use of the data. Google says a subset of chats are reviewed by human reviewers, including its trained service providers, to improve the service. Its own warning on the support page is blunt: "Please don't enter confidential information that you wouldn't want a reviewer to see."

Reviewed chats are disconnected from your Google account before a human sees them, but they are not deleted when you delete your activity. Google retains those copies for up to three years. Activity that is never selected for review is auto-deleted after 18 months by default, though users can choose a 3-month or 36-month window instead.

Work accounts play by different rules

The policy covers personal accounts only. Google's business and developer surfaces sit under separate data terms: Gemini in Workspace, the Gemini API and Vertex AI do not use customer content for model training, and Workspace admins can set retention and hold chats in Vault. That split is part of what surprised the Hacker News thread — the same company offers a no-training guarantee to its enterprise customers while its paying consumers get none.

The episode is less a revelation than a reminder. Google's documentation has said all of this for some time; it is simply not where most people look, and nothing at checkout tells a new subscriber that their conversations will feed the models they are paying to use. Until Google separates the training switch from the memory switch, Gemini users face a simple choice: keep your history, or keep your chats out of training. You cannot do both.

By Hamza Faisal