With its most current replace, Google Bard can now kind by your trove of Google Docs, rediscover historical Gmail messages, and search by each video on YouTube. Before experimenting an excessive amount of with the new extensions out there for Google’s chatbot, it is price going over the steps you possibly can take to guard your privateness (and those you possibly can’t).

Google Bard launched in March of this yr, one month after OpenAI launched ChatGPT to the general public. You’re seemingly conversant in how chatbots are designed to imitate human dialog, however Google’s newest options are designed to present Bard extra sensible purposes and makes use of.

But when each dialog you’ve gotten with Bard is tracked, logged, and used once more to coach the AI, how will you belief it along with your information? Here are some tricks to defend your prompts and assert some management over what info you give Bard. Then we’ll talk about location information, for which Google sadly gives fewer privacy options.

The default Bard setting is to retailer each interplay you’ve gotten with the chatbot for 18 months. In addition to your prompts, Bard shops your approximate location, IP tackle, and any bodily addresses related to your Google account for work or dwelling. While the default settings are activated, any dialog you’ve gotten with Bard may very well be chosen for human assessment.

Want to show this off? When you’re within the Bard Activity tab, you possibly can cease it from autosaving your prompts and likewise delete any previous interactions. “We give you this choice around Bard Activity, which you can turn on or off, if you want to keep your conversations [from being] human-reviewable,” says Jack Krawczyk, a product lead at Google for Bard.

After you flip off Bard Activity, your new chats are usually not submitted for human assessment, until you report a selected interplay to Google. But there’s a catch: If you flip off Bard Activity, then you possibly can’t use any of the chatbot’s extensions connecting the AI device to Gmail, YouTube, and Google Docs.

Yes, you possibly can select to delete interactions with Bard manually, however the information won’t be faraway from Google servers till some level later, when the corporate decides to delete it (if ever). “To help Bard improve while protecting your privacy, we select a subset of conversations and use automated tools to help remove personally identifiable information,” a Google support page reads. The conversations chosen for human assessment are not tied to your private account, and these interactions are saved by Google for as much as three years, even in the event you clear it out of your Bard Activity.

It’s additionally price noting that any Bard dialog you need to share with mates or coworkers may potentially be indexed by Google Search. At the time of publication, a number of Bard interactions have been accessible by Search, from a job hunter requesting recommendation when making use of for a place at YouTube Music to somebody asking for 50 completely different components they might mix into protein powder.