Gemini can now scan your photos, email, and more to provide better answers

Perhaps sensing that feeding more data into Gemini would give many people the creeps, Google’s announcement explains at great length how the company has approached privacy in Personal Intelligence. Google isn’t getting any new information about you—your photos, email, and search behaviors are already stored on Google’s servers, so “you don’t have to send sensitive data elsewhere to start personalizing your experience.”

Having the chatbot regurgitate your photos and emails might still be a little unsettling, but Google claims it has built guardrails that keep Gemini from musing on sensitive topics. For example, the chatbot won’t use any health information it finds. However, you can still ask for it to look at that information explicitly.

Google also stresses that your personal data is “not directly used to train the model.” So the images or search habits it references in outputs are not used for training, but the prompts and resulting outputs may be used. Woodward notes that all personal data is filtered from training data. Put another way, the system isn’t trained to learn your license plate number, but it is trained to be able to locate an image containing your license plate.

This feature will be in beta for a while as it rolls out, and it may take several weeks to reach all paid Gemini accounts. It will work across all Gemini endpoints, including the web, Android, and iOS.

Google also says it plans to expand access to Personal Intelligence in Gemini down the road. Unless Google flip-flops on the default settings, you can leave this feature disabled. That ensures Gemini won’t get additional access to your data, but of course, all that data is still sitting on Google’s servers. This probably won’t be the last time Google tries to entice you to plug your photos into an AI tool.