In today’s world of AI and the internet, privacy of your information is more important than ever. As I wrote in my ChatGPT article, usually whatever you enter into search can be used for training the AI system unless you tell it otherwise.
More than ever before, you have to be extremely careful because companies change their data privacy settings and rules which means you have to remain diligent.
I just received an email from Google Gemini AI Apps platform about “important updates”. The subject line didn’t mention that it was concerning data privacy!
I had played around with Google’s Gemini AI with thoughts to create a specific application. I don’t use it for everyday AI use, but I wasn’t sure if it was connected to my regular Google searches (it’s not).
Google Gemini added a new “temporary chat” feature that keeps the history for only 72 hours. However, this wasn’t the most important thing in the email.
Google proceeds to try to explain some data updates:
It’s saying that they are going to use anything I give them to “help improve Googles services for everyone” unless the setting is off. This means our files can be used for training.
Be very careful about the information (searches, photos, files, etc.) you give AI systems. Even if you think it’s secure, the privacy and data rules are constantly changing.
Here are the top 5 things to not load into internet search engines, ChatGPT, or any AI platform, unless you want the world to one day know it too.
- Medical results – even if you remove your name and information, the AI will know it was you that uploaded it unless you do some technical things to hide who you are.
- Identity information – driver’s license number, social security number, date of birth, address, and phone number. I’ll be doing a future article on how to use services to remove this info from various websites.
- Financial information – credit card, banking, net worth, retirement, and other financial info should never be uploaded to AI. It gives others knowledge which can be used for scams or fraud in the future.
- Logins – this seems obvious, but people are using AI to perform certain tasks which means the AI needs to mimic you. Make sure you trust the AI platform to secure your login information if you want to use AI to record online meetings or do your social media.
- Business information – there are people being fired because they have uploaded confidential information from their companies into public AI platforms like ChatGPT. Ask your company about their AI policy; they may have a private AI platform you can use.
