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.
The mechanism is called Circle to Search when it lives on-device (Samsung Galaxy S24 and newer, Pixel 8 and up), and Google Lens when it's the camera icon inside Search or its own app. Both funnel into the same back end: a "Search Services History" setting that logs the images, screenshots, and audio clips you use to search, with a "Save Media" checkbox switched on by default. Leave it checked, and the photo of the mystery plant in your backyard or the screenshot of a receipt you're asking "is this a scam" about becomes part of the pool Google draws from to improve its models.
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.
Separately — and this is the distinction most coverage glosses over — Gemini has run its own version of this since September 2, 2025. Files, videos, photos, and screenshots uploaded into a Gemini conversation get sampled to improve the product unless you've turned off what Google now calls "Keep Activity" (renamed from "Gemini Apps Activity" that same month, which is why longtime users searching their settings for the old name come up empty). Gemini's real escape hatch is Temporary Chats: those conversations and their attachments are excluded from training and auto-delete from Google's servers after 72 hours. Everything else defaults to retained and eligible for training.
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 defensible read is that Google buried a meaningfully consequential setting inside a menu almost nobody visits, gave it an anodyne name, and shipped it pre-checked. That's not a conspiracy — it's a company optimizing for the fact that most users never touch privacy settings, and a pre-checked box converts far better than an opt-in prompt ever would. I'd argue the naming is the tell: "Save Media" reads like a convenience feature for your own benefit, not a pipeline into model training data. Call a setting what it actually does, and adoption drops. Google knows that as well as anyone building consumer software does.
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.
