Point your phone's camera at a lamp, circle a jacket on someone's Instagram story, or upload a screenshot into Google Lens, and you're not just running a search. You're handing Google a training sample. As of this summer, that's not a hidden default buried in a terms-of-service update; it's a named setting, and most people have never opened it.

Circle to Search, Google Lens, Search uploads, and Gemini uploads are different products and data flows. Device and model availability change; privacy conclusions must follow the specific feature and account type, not a shared camera icon.

What's actually being collected

Three categories, confirmed in Google's own settings copy: pictures you upload or circle for a visual search, screenshots captured through Circle to Search, and audio recordings from voice search and from Google Translate's speak-to-translate mode. None of this is exotic, it's the ordinary stuff people run through search dozens of times a week. The setting change also widened the net beyond Search itself: this history track now spans Maps, Shopping, Flights, Hotels, Translate, and News. A hotel photo you searched to find a similar listing and a phrase you spoke into Translate on vacation both land in the same bucket.

For personal Gemini accounts, Google says files, photos, videos, screens, and other content shared with Gemini can be saved in Activity and used to improve services, including generative models, when Keep Activity is on, with human-review conditions described in the Privacy Hub. Audio and Gemini Live media have a separate control that is off by default. Temporary Chats are not used to train Google’s AI models and are retained for up to 72 hours for response, feedback, and safety purposes. Turning Keep Activity off also prevents future chats from training models unless feedback is submitted, but short retention and managed-account rules still apply.123

What you can actually control

Two levers exist, and they are not the same lever wearing different names.

  • Turn off Web & App Activity entirely, at myactivity.google.com/myactivity. Google has said this carries forward as an opt-out when new settings roll in, the blunt-instrument option, and it also mutes personalization elsewhere: search suggestions, Maps recommendations, the works.
  • Leave Web & App Activity on, but uncheck "Save Media" under Search Services History. This is the scalpel: you keep your search history and personalization, but the images and audio themselves stop being retained and stop being candidates for training.
  • In Gemini specifically, open Settings & help → Activity and choose "Turn off" or "Turn off and delete activity," or default to Temporary Chats for anything you don't want touching a training set at all.

What you cannot control is retroactive: opting out today doesn't unwind media Google already logged and potentially sampled before you flipped the switch. There's also no per-search toggle, you're managing a standing account setting, not consenting query by query, and the toggle you set for Search doesn't touch Gemini's separate activity control. Google's own policy language notes that some of what gets sampled for training is also reviewed by a person, not only processed by a model.

The part worth being unapologetic about

The evidence establishes defaults and controls, not Google’s motive or a conversion strategy. Users should read the current notice, avoid confidential uploads to consumer services, and confirm administrator and Vault rules for organizational accounts.123

Two settings, two products, one habit worth building: check what "save" means before you leave the box checked.

None of this requires becoming a privacy absolutist to act on. It requires ten minutes at myactivity.google.com, a second stop at gemini.google.com's Activity settings if you use Gemini directly, and the discipline to remember that every photo run through Lens and every screenshot circled on your phone is, by default, a contribution to the model; not just a question you asked and forgot about.