How to Prevent Google Bard from Storing Your Information and Location? Google Bard can now search through your Google Docs archive, retrieve old Gmail communications, and search for every YouTube video. Before you start experimenting with the new extensions for Google’s chatbot, it’s worth reviewing the actions you can (and cannot) take to protect your privacy.
Google Bard was released in March of this year, one month after OpenAI made ChatGPT available to the public. You’re probably aware of how chatbots are supposed to resemble human communication, but Google’s latest improvements aim to give Bard more practical applications and use.
But how can you trust it with your data if every discussion you have with Bard is tracked, logged, and used to train the AI? Here are some pointers to help you secure your prompts and regain control over the information you offer Bard. Then we’ll talk about location data, which unfortunately has fewer privacy alternatives than Google.
How to Prevent Google Bard from Storing Your Information and Location?
The default Bard option saves all interactions with the chatbot for 18 months. Bard stores your approximate location, IP address, and any physical addresses associated with your Google account for work or home, in addition to your instructions. While the default settings remain in place, each interaction you have with Bard may be flagged for human review.
Do you want to disable this? When you’re on the Bard Activity page, you may disable the autosaving of prompts and erase any previous interactions. “We give you this option around Bard Activity, which you can turn on or off if you want to keep your conversations [from being] human-reviewable,” says Jack Krawczyk, Google Bard product lead.
Unless you report a specific conversation to Google after you disable Bard Activity, your new chats are not submitted for human review. But there’s a catch: If you disable Bard Activity, you won’t be able to utilise any of the chatbot’s extensions that connect the AI tool to Gmail, YouTube, or Google Docs.
Yes, you can delete interactions with Bard manually, but the data may not be purged from Google servers until the business decides to delete it (if at all). “To help Bard improve while protecting your privacy, we select a subset of conversations and use automated tools to help remove personally identifiable information,” according to a page on Google’s support site. Conversations selected for human review are no longer linked to your personal account, and Google stores these interactions for up to three years, even if you delete them from your Bard Activity.
It’s also worth knowing that every Bard discussion you have with friends or coworkers may be indexed by Google Search. Multiple Bard conversations were available through Search at the time of writing, ranging from a job seeker seeking guidance when applying for a position at YouTube Music to someone looking for 50 different ingredients to combine into protein powder.
To cease online sharing of any Bard links you’ve shared, go to Settings in the upper right corner, pick Your Public Links, and click the trash icon. Google said on social media that it is working to prevent shared chats from being indexed by Search.
Also Read: How to Find Your Stuff in Gmail and Docs Using Google Bard?
