Google has quietly updated how it collects data from users of its search tools. The company can now use media you upload across its search products to train its AI systems, and every user is automatically opted in. No announcement, no fanfare, just a policy change sitting there until someone notices.
According to Engadget, the change covers a wide range of what Google calls ‘Search-related products.’ That means if you upload a photo to Google Lens to identify a plant or a piece of furniture, Google can keep it for AI training. The same applies to audio from voice searches and anything you feed into Google Translate. In short: images, files, audio recordings and video are all fair game.
The good news, if you can call it that, is Google Photos is not included for now. This applies specifically to media uploaded through search tools, not your personal storage. But given how many people use Lens and voice search daily, the scope is still significant.
This move fits a pattern that has become hard to ignore. AI companies are running out of fresh data to train their models on, so they are looking closer to home. Google, Meta, and others have all made similar moves in recent months, quietly adjusting terms of service to expand what user-generated content they can use. It rarely makes headlines until someone reads the fine print.
If you want to opt out, the process takes about two minutes:
- Go to the Search Services History page in your Google account settings and uncheck the “Save Media” box
- Then visit the Search Services Personalization page and make sure nothing is being saved there either
That should cover it. As a separate tip, if you want to stop seeing AI-generated overviews in your search results altogether, just add “-AI” before your search query and Google will skip them.
The broader issue here is consent, or the lack of it. Opting users in by default and burying the opt-out in settings pages is a strategy that relies on most people never looking. It works, too. Most people will never make these changes simply because they will never know this happened. That is exactly how these policies are designed to work.
