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Comment by zarzavat | Hacker News Reader

Unless explicitly promised otherwise, the assumption is always that anything being passed to a LLM API may be retained for various reasons. That’s the expectation that’s been set by the industry.

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Agreed, but as I understand it they do make that promise:

"We do not use your Workspace data to train or improve the underlying generative AI and large language models that power Gemini, Search, and other systems outside of Workspace without permission."

https://support.google.com/docs/answer/14615114?hl=en

Edit: I believe that this "without permission" caveat refers to experimental things like Workspace Labs where you have to give them that permission if you decide to join.

Where can I see the value of the "user has granted permission" boolean relevant to my account, clearly and unambiguously? I want to be sure that I haven't accidentally given permission via an action that I may have not understood.

I'm not aware of any such on/off switch or indicator. You could check whether you can turn off Workspace Labs. If you can't turn it off then you haven't joined:

https://support.google.com/docs/answer/13447104?hl=en#labs-o...

I'm not sure whether there are any other beta programs that require these permissions.

If this is the case, then the phrasing "without permission" is meaningless and so is the clause attached to it. We have to assume that Google thinks we've "given permission".

Sure. That's also the assumption when you upload your private information to someone else's computer. Except for the "unless explicitly promised otherwise" part.

Why would that be limited to passing it to an LLM and not just passing it to any server? If Google wanted to use your data for training, they would just... do that? No Gemini needed

I would presume that google has already trained Gemini on all the documents.

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