Google’s Gemini App Can Now Remember or Forget Past Conversations

Google’s Gemini app now allows users to tell it to remember or to forget past chats.

The company began rolling out these features for the artificial intelligence (AI) assistant today and will continue to do so over the coming weeks, it said in a Wednesday (Aug. 13) blog post.

“Today we’re updating the Gemini app so it becomes an even more personal, proactive and powerful assistant, while also providing you more control over your data,” Michael Siliski, senior director, product management, Gemini app, wrote in the post.

One new setting allows Gemini to learn from the user’s past conversations so that the more the user interacts with the app, the more personalized its responses become, according to the post.

This setting is on by default, but users can turn it on or off at any time and can manage and delete their conversations, the post said.

Another new feature, Temporary Chat, allows users to have conversations with the Gemini app, while keeping those chats private.

Temporary Chats won’t appear in the user’s recent chats or Gemini Apps Activity, won’t be used to personalize the user’s experience or train Google’s AI models, and will be saved for only 72 hours, per the post.

Google also announced in the post that in the coming weeks it will change the name of “Gemini Apps Activity” to “Keep Activity” and will enable users to use this setting to control whether their data is used to help improve Google services. To prevent their data from being used, they can toggle this setting or use Temporary Chats.

“Because we know trust is earned through transparency and control, we believe it’s important to provide you with the tools to manage your data,” Siliski wrote in the post.

This announcement follows some incidents with other AI assistants that heightened users concerns about privacy.

It was reported Aug. 4 that Meta’s AI assistant may publicly share user prompts, including personal or sensitive information, in the “Discover” feed.

On July 31, it was reported that users of OpenAI’s ChatGPT may have been inadvertently sharing their conversations with the AI chatbot in search results.