Google has spent 2023 putting generative AI into everything — Bard, “Help me write” in Gmail and Docs, AI-generated ad campaigns, a tool that drafts news articles — and a suspicion has grown alongside it: that the model learned to write emails by reading ours. This week Google addressed it directly. Yulie Kwon Kim, vice-president of product for Google Workspace, said generative AI does not change the company’s privacy commitments, that Google does not sell Workspace data, and that users retain control of it, including the right to delete it.
What Google actually promised
The statement has precise edges. Workspace content — the email, documents, spreadsheets and chat of paying business, school and government accounts — is not used to train or improve generative AI or large language models outside Workspace without the customer’s permission. It is not used for advertising and is never sold. Within Workspace, features like Smart Compose and spam filtering do learn from your own usage, as they always have, and the new AI features process your content to answer your requests. That is the normal contract for business software, and Google’s competitors make the same one.
What it does not cover
Two things. First, consumer Gmail — the free @gmail.com account that almost everyone in Bangladesh uses — is governed by Google’s general privacy policy, not the Workspace terms. Google stopped scanning Gmail for ad targeting in 2017 and says it does not use Gmail content to train Bard either, but the guarantee is a policy statement rather than a contractual one. Second, Bard itself: conversations you have with the chatbot are, by default, stored, reviewed by human raters and used to improve the model. That is why Bard shows a warning not to enter confidential information, and why Google’s own staff were told not to paste internal code into it.
The setting that decides
- Go to bard.google.com/activity (or myactivity.google.com → Bard Activity).
- Turn Bard Activity off to stop new conversations being saved and used for training; existing ones can be deleted from the same page. With it off, conversations are still kept for 72 hours for safety review.
- For a Workspace account, the administrator controls this under Admin console → Apps → Additional Google services → Bard.
Why it matters here
Bangladesh’s banks, NGOs and universities run largely on Workspace, and their concern — client files, student records, donor lists — is covered by the promise. The freelancer whose entire business is in a free Gmail is covered by a policy that Google can change with a notice. The difference is worth Tk700 a month, which is what the cheapest Workspace plan costs, and for anyone handling other people’s data that is the price of a contract instead of a promise.
Source: Times of India, via Prothom Alo.
