“These new settings help users get more relevant results and revisit their searches – including visual and voice searches – and they can be turned on or off at any time,” says Davis Thompson, a Google spokesperson, over email when reached for comment. He did not answer WIRED’s question about this feature being on by default.
What’s really being saved here? Google is clear that it’s starting to store much more than just what you type into Search. “Your saved media includes your images, files, and audio and video recordings from your interactions with Search services,” reads the page’s description. “This includes things like Google Lens images, recordings from Search Live or Translate speaking practice, content you upload, and voice searches.”
This is because AI models don’t just need text data to improve; they need diverse inputs in other forms, like audio or video. If Google can gather more data, and more types of data, from its vast array of users, then maybe it could innovate faster than its competitors.
Google’s massive user base is spread across multiple services, giving it an edge in data collection. “Google is in a unique spot compared to a lot of the other companies with this,” says Thorin Klosowski, a senior security and privacy activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Because they offer so many services that people have been using for so long and have grown pretty comfortable and complacent with the amount of data collected.” Apps that people use every day have a kind of built-in inertia, so changes that users don’t like may not be enough to drive them to alternative services.
Being forced to opt out of AI training seems to be the standard across sites and platforms. It doesn’t have to be this way. “I think ‘opt in’ is really asking the bare minimum of these companies,” Klosowski says. “Asking their users to consciously choose to enable these features is the least they can do.” Google would have to make a stronger case to users on why these features could be helpful if they weren’t automatically just turned on, Klosowski says.
In Google’s email sent to my testing account on 23 June, the first sentence framed this change as giving me “even more control over saved history.” Google then provided examples in the message showing how saving this media may be helpful. “For example, this lets you revisit your past visual searches with Lens or continue a Search Live conversation about a song you heard.” In contrast, it’s notable that Google didn’t provide similar examples after stating near the end of the email that this saved media will be used for AI model training. Rather, the message just continued to the next detail.