I don’t know about you, but I practically live in Google. I check my Gmail once or twice…a thousand times a day. I manage my schedule in Google Calendar. I constantly use The Goog to search for information and save terabytes of data on Google Drive.
And then there’s Bard. We’ve studied how AI works and, of course, it has its problems. That said, its potential is enormous. With the support of Google’s Brain Trust, I’m confident it will soon be more than a competitor.
The problem with large language model AIs like Bard and ChatGPT is that they have to train using a huge amount of data. I was concerned that Bard, since it is linked to the same account as my email, would have an idea of the correspondence in my email.
“Your conversations are processed by human reviewers”
This correspondence often contains confidential messages from clients and companies I work with, not to mention personal correspondence with family and friends. I was worried that Bard would suck up my email traffic and use it somehow. The worst case scenario was the idea of Bard sending all my email correspondence to a central knowledge base where other people could potentially have access to it. Fortunately, this is not the case. Largely.
As you can see in the blue box in the screenshot below, “Your conversations [avec Bard] are processed by human reviewers to improve the technologies that power Bard. Don’t enter anything you wouldn’t want to see reviewed or used.”
If you click on “How it works”, you will find some comforting news. Google says:
Content from your Google Workspace, like Gmail or Drive, is not reviewed or used to improve Bard.
But don’t have too many illusions about protecting your privacy. It turns out you can turn off human review of conversations you have with Bard, and even turn off automatic analysis of those conversations. Here’s how to do it.
At the top right of the Bard screen, click the clock icon. This is the Activities icon (highlighted in yellow):
Click Disable where it says “Bard Activity”.
You will get a large message box stating that the activity is disabled.
You have finished. Now, when you go to the Bard screen, you will see this message on the left:
While this screen is visible, Bard does not record your conversations.
To re-enable recording, click the “Bard activity is disabled” link. You will then have the option to reactivate activity monitoring:
By disabling the activity, you lose some Bard functionality. But you also lose that nagging worry that your search for “What songs sound like Rick Astley’s 1987 song Never Gonna Give You Up?” is shared with Google.
For the record, Rick Astley’s 1987 song Together Forever is actually Never Gonna’s twin Give You Up, and Bard thinks Dead or Alive’s You Spin Me Round and a-ha’s Take On Me have the same Rickroller vibe than the Rick Astley classic.
Source: “ZDNet.com”