Google Gemini

What the default settings do

Gemini’s consumer app defaults to keeping a record of your conversations through a setting called Gemini Apps Activity, sometimes shown simply as “Keep Activity.” For accounts 18 and older, this is on by default, and it stores your prompts, any files or images you upload, and Gemini Live transcripts and audio to your Google Account, viewable and deletable later through My Activity. With activity on, that history is auto-deleted after 18 months by default, though you can change the window or turn auto-delete off entirely.

There’s an important caveat that applies no matter how you set that toggle. Google’s own privacy documentation states that even with Gemini Apps Activity off, or when using a temporary chat, your conversations are still retained in connection with your account for up to 72 hours, so Google can process the request, respond to you, and handle safety and abuse prevention. There is no setting that gets you to zero retention on the consumer product; 72 hours is the practical floor.

Separately, Google reviews a sample of conversations by hand to improve Gemini’s quality. If one of your chats is selected for this kind of human review, Google disconnects it from your account before a reviewer sees it, but that disconnected copy is then kept for up to three years, specifically because it’s no longer tied to your identity in Google’s systems. Deleting your activity through My Activity does not reach or remove this separately retained set. Turning Gemini Apps Activity off does stop future conversations from being eligible for this human review and model-training pipeline going forward.

Gemini can also connect to other Google services, including Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Docs, Photos, and Google’s Search-family products, through what Google calls personal context or connected apps. None of this is active until you turn it on, but once connected, Gemini can draw on the contents of those services to answer questions and generate suggestions.

Gemini for Google Workspace, the version built into business and education accounts, works differently from the consumer app: Google states this Workspace content is not used to train its generative models and is not reviewed by humans for that purpose, consistent with the data handling commitments Workspace already makes for other core services.

A reasonable privacy baseline

These settings are found at gemini.google.com, in the Activity panel and personalization settings, or directly through myactivity.google.com.

Activity and retention

Connected apps and personal context

Human review

Trade-offs

• Turning off Gemini Apps Activity means Gemini won’t build a persistent memory of your preferences the way it does when activity is kept, so some personalization and continuity across sessions is lost.
• The 72-hour operational retention applies no matter what you choose, so there is no setting on the consumer product that guarantees your conversation is fully gone the moment you close the tab.
• Shortening auto-delete to 3 months means losing the ability to search back further in your own Gemini history if you find that useful for recalling past research or drafts.
• Disconnecting Gmail, Drive, or other services removes Gemini’s ability to reference their contents directly, which may mean more manual copy-pasting to get the same help.
• Because human review happens on a sample of conversations rather than all of them, keeping activity on does not guarantee any specific conversation will or won’t be reviewed; it only affects whether it’s eligible.

Who should not change these settings

• If you use Gemini as a daily assistant and rely on it remembering context from earlier conversations, such as an ongoing project or your general preferences, keeping Gemini Apps Activity on with a longer retention window supports that continuity directly.
• If you want to help Google improve Gemini’s responses and are comfortable with a small chance of a human reviewer seeing a disconnected copy of a conversation, leaving activity on is a reasonable and informed choice, not a mistake.
• If you regularly use Gemini alongside Gmail, Drive, or Docs for drafting and research, keeping those connections active is likely worth the convenience, especially if you already trust Google with that data through those services directly.
• If you’re on a Workspace or education account through your employer or school, Google’s stated handling of that data is already separate from the consumer training and human-review pipeline, so there is typically less to change on this front specifically.