Bard Privacy Help Hub

Last updated: September 18, 2023

Table of contents

Bard Privacy Notice

Last updated: September 18, 2023

Your data and Bard

This notice and our Privacy Policy describe how Google handles your Bard data. Please read them carefully. In the European Economic Area and Switzerland, Bard is provided by Google Ireland Limited; everywhere else, Bard is provided by Google LLC (each referred to as Google, as applicable).

Google collects your Bard conversations, related product usage information, info about your location, and your feedback. Google uses this data, consistent with our Privacy Policy, to provide, improve, and develop Google products and services and machine learning technologies, including Google’s enterprise products such as Google Cloud.

By default, Google stores your Bard activity with your Google Account for up to 18 months, which you can change to 3 or 36 months at myactivity.google.com/product/bard. Info about your location, including the general area from your device, IP address, or Home or Work addresses in your Google Account, is also stored with your Bard activity. Learn more at g.co/privacypolicy/location.

To help with quality and improve our products (such as generative machine-learning models that power Bard), human reviewers read, annotate, and process your Bard conversations. We take steps to protect your privacy as part of this process. This includes disconnecting your conversations with Bard from your Google Account before reviewers see or annotate them. Please don’t enter confidential information in your Bard conversations or any data you wouldn’t want a reviewer to see or Google to use to improve our products, services, and machine-learning technologies.

Configuring your settings

Visit your Google Account to access settings and tools that let you safeguard your data and protect your privacy.

If you want to use Bard without saving your conversations to your Google Account, you can pause saving your Bard activity. You can review your prompts or delete your Bard conversations from your Bard activity at myactivity.google.com/product/bard. Bard conversations that have been reviewed or annotated by human reviewers (and related data like your language, device type, location info, or feedback) are not deleted when you delete your Bard activity because they are kept separately and are not connected to your Google Account. Instead, they are retained for up to three years.

Even when Bard Activity is off, your conversations will be saved with your account for up to 72 hours. This lets Google provide the service and process any feedback. This activity won’t appear in your Bard Activity. Learn More

If you turn off this setting or delete your Bard activity, other settings, like Web & App Activity or Location History, may continue to save location and other data as part of your use of other Google services. In addition, when you integrate and use Bard with other Google services, they will save and use your data to provide and improve their services, consistent with their policies and the Google Privacy Policy.

You can request for the removal of content under our policies or applicable laws. You can also export your information.

See Bard Product FAQ and Bard Privacy Help Hub to learn more about how Bard works and how Google uses your Bard data.

Things to know

  • Bard uses your location and your past conversations to provide you with its best answer.
  • Bard is an experimental technology and may sometimes give inaccurate or inappropriate information that doesn’t represent Google’s views.
  • Don’t rely on Bard’s responses as medical, legal, financial, or other professional advice.
  • Your feedback will help make Bard better.

Terms of Service

You agree that your use of Bard is subject to the Google Terms of Service and the Generative AI Additional Terms of Service.

If you’re an EEA-based consumer, then EEA consumer law gives you the right to withdraw from these terms within 14 days of accepting them, as described in the EU’s Model Instructions on Withdrawal.

Privacy questions

How can I object to the processing of my data or ask for inaccurate data in Bard’s responses to be corrected?

LLM experiences (Bard included) can hallucinate and present inaccurate information as factual.

Report inaccurate responses about you

If you notice that Bard responds with factually inaccurate information about you, you can submit feedback directly in Bard. Below Bard’s response, select More and then Report legal issue.

You can also request the correction or object to the processing of your information in Bard’s responses based on applicable law and our policies.

Create a request

Additional resources

To learn more about how to exercise your rights related to data we’ve collected, read the Google Privacy Policy and the Bard Privacy Notice.

What are Google’s legal bases of processing Bard data under European Union (EU) or United Kingdom (UK) data protection law?

If European Union (EU) or United Kingdom (UK) data protection law applies to the processing of your information, please read the below carefully.

When you use Bard, Google processes your information for the purposes, and on the legal grounds, described below.

When we refer to “your Bard information” below we mean all of the following: (i) your Bard conversations and related product usage information (which includes your location information); and (ii) your feedback.

Google’s legal bases are:

  • Performance of a contract. We process your Bard information, and any of your other information you give Bard permission to process when you integrate Bard with another service, so that we can provide and maintain the Bard service you have requested under the Google Terms of Service and the Generative AI Additional Terms of Service. For example, we process your Bard information to respond to your queries, and to provide various Bard features and functionalities such as code generation.
  • Google and third parties' legitimate interests with appropriate safeguards to protect your privacy.
    • We process information from publicly accessible sources and your Bard information so that we can provide, maintain, improve, and develop Google products, services, and machine learning technologies.
      • Processing this information for this purpose is necessary for the legitimate interests of Google and our users in:
        • Providing, maintaining, and improving our services to meet the needs of our users (such as using conversations to fine-tune models and improve Bard's responses for safety and accuracy).
        • Developing new products and features that are useful for our users (such as learning how to route requests to new large language models best suited to answer a particular question or training new models to handle these requests).
        • Understanding how people use our services to ensure and improve the performance of our services (such as generating metrics to understand how users are using Bard to better tailor user experience).
        • Customizing our services to provide users with a better experience (such as using your location information and your past conversations so Bard provides a more relevant answer).
    • We also process your Bard information so that we can maintain the functionality, safety and reliability of Bard, including by detecting, preventing, and responding to fraud, abuse, security risks, and technical issues that could affect Google, our users, or the public.
      • Processing this information for this purpose is necessary for the legitimate interests of Google, our users, and the public in:
        • Detecting, preventing, or otherwise addressing fraud, abuse, security, or technical issues with our services (such as fixing bugs and troubleshooting failures).
        • Protecting against harm to the rights, property, or safety of Google, our users, or the public as required or permitted by law (such as updating safety classifiers and model filters).
        • Performing research that improves our services for our users and benefits the public.
        • Enforcing legal claims, including investigation of potential violations of applicable terms of service (such as reviewing suspicious activity and interactions flagged as problematic).
      • Processing this information for this purpose is also necessary for the legitimate interests of Google and our commercial partners in fulfilling obligations to our partners like developers and rights holders (such as honoring removal requests from intellectual property rights holders).
    • To respond to your request, for example to summarize an email from a named contact, we process personal data about others that you've given Bard (such as when you integrate Bard with another service like Google Workspace).
  • Legal obligations. We’ll also process your Bard information to meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process, or enforceable governmental request (such as if we get a legal request for information from a governmental authority).
  • Your consent. As Bard develops, we may ask for your consent to process your information for specific purposes. Where we rely on your consent to process information, you will have the right to withdraw your consent at any time.
What data is collected? How is it used?

When you interact with Bard, Google collects your conversations, your location, your feedback, and usage information, as explained in more detail in the Google Privacy Policy and the Bard Privacy Notice. That data helps us provide, improve and develop Google products, services, and machine-learning technologies, as explained in the Google Privacy Policy and the Bard Privacy Notice. For example, we use your feedback to help make Bard safer and help minimize some of the challenges inherent to large language models. And Bard uses your past interactions with it and your location to generate its response. You can change your location settings anytime. Learn more at g.co/privacypolicy/location.

Google has a standardized and rigorous review process for improving Bard, which includes review of conversations reported with negative feedback. This helps us identify common types of problematic responses and how Bard might improve.

Read our Privacy and Security Principles to better understand how we keep our users’ data private, safe, and secure.

Do you use my Bard conversations to show me ads?

Your Bard conversations are not being used to show you ads. If this changes, we will clearly communicate it to you.

To learn about how we keep our users’ data private, safe, and secure, read our Privacy and Security Principles.

Who has access to my Bard conversations?

We take your privacy seriously, and we do not sell your personal information to anyone. To help Bard improve while protecting your privacy, we select a subset of conversations and use automated tools to help remove user identifying information (such as email addresses and phone numbers). These sample conversations are reviewed by trained reviewers and kept for up to three years, separately from your Google Account. Read the Bard Privacy Notice to learn more.

Please don’t enter confidential information in your Bard conversations or any data you wouldn’t want a reviewer to see or Google to use to improve our products, services, and machine-learning technologies.

Can I access and delete my data from my Google Account?

Yes, there’s a link to managing your data in Bard. Learn how to manage and delete your Bard activity. You can always turn off Bard Activity, and you can delete your Bard activity from your account any time at myactivity.google.com/product/bard. And, as explained in the Google Privacy Policy and the Bard Privacy Notice, you can export your information. Even when Bard Activity is off, your conversations will be saved with your account for up to 72 hours to allow us to provide the service and process any feedback. This activity will not show up in your Bard Activity.

If you turn off Bard Activity, it doesn’t delete your past data, but you can manually delete it anytime at myactivity.google.com/product/bard.

You can also delete recent or pinned conversations in Bard by selecting those conversations and then selecting “Delete.” This action will also delete related activity like prompts, responses, and feedback from your Bard activity. Learn what happens when a chat is deleted.

Why is human review of my Bard conversations, feedback, and related data required?

Google uses conversations (as well as feedback and related data) from Bard users to improve Google products (such as the generative machine-learning models that power Bard), so we can make them safer, more helpful, and work better for all users. Human review is a necessary step of the model improvement process. Through their review, rating, and rewrites, humans help enable quality improvements of generative machine-learning models like the ones that power Bard.

We take a number of precautions to protect your privacy during this human review process: conversations (as well as feedback and related data like your language, device type, or location info) that reviewers see and annotate are not associated with any user accounts. We pick a random sample for such human review, and only a portion of all Bard conversations are reviewed.

For instance, our trained reviewers look at conversations to assess if Bard’s response is low-quality, inaccurate, or harmful. From there, trained evaluators suggest higher-quality responses. These are then used to create a better dataset for generative machine-learning models to learn from so our models can produce improved responses in the future.

Bard conversations that have been reviewed by human reviewers (as well as feedback and related data like your language, device type, or location info) are not deleted when you delete your Bard activity because they are kept separately and are not connected to your Google Account. Instead, they are retained for up to 3 years.

Learn more about how to turn off, manage, and delete your Bard activity at any time.

Why does Google retain my conversations after I turn off Bard Activity and what does Google do with this data?

Google needs these conversations to respond to you and as context for your feedback to help maintain and improve Bard, and provide all users a safer and better quality experience.

Here are more details about conversations stored with your account even after you turn off Bard Activity:

Before you give feedback in Bard

  • If Bard Activity is turned off, Google retains your conversations with your account for up to 72 hours. This activity won’t appear in your Bard Activity and is used to:
    • Respond to your conversation contextually. For this purpose, Bard uses only 24 hours of data.
    • Maintain the safety and security of Bard and improve Bard. For this purpose, Google needs the 72-hour retention period to help ensure that data from its backend processes is available in case of a potential failure in its systems.
  • If you turn off Bard Activity, Google does not use your new conversations stored with your account to improve its generative machine learning technologies (except where you provide feedback, as explained below). Also, turning off Bard Activity does not delete your past activity. Learn how to delete your Bard activity.

After you give feedback in Bard

If you decide to send feedback to Google, Google’s systems collect the following information:

  • Your feedback.
  • Any content you include.
  • Context that can help us better understand your feedback. This includes available conversation data, such as what you recently asked Bard and what Bard said back. 

Even if your Bard Activity is turned off, your feedback is stored within the Bard feedback pipeline and used as described below.

How feedback is used

The feedback, associated conversations, and related data are:

  • Reviewed by specially trained teams. Human review is necessary to help identify, address, and report potential problems raised in feedback, including as required under applicable laws.
  • Used consistent with the Google Privacy Policy. Google uses this data to provide, improve, and develop Google products, services, and machine-learning technologies, as explained in more detail in our Privacy Policy. This includes improving the safety of Bard. For example, we may use this information to help us detect and avoid unsafe requests or responses in the future.
  • Retained for up to 3 years. Reviewed feedback, associated conversations, and related data are retained for up to 3 years, disconnected from your Google Account.

Learn how to send feedback or report a problem with Bard.

What does it mean that Bard is an experimental technology?

As explained in this overview of Bard by James Manyika (Google’s SVP, Technology and Society), Bard is powered by a large language model and, similar to most large language models (LLMs), was pre-trained on a variety of data from publicly available sources. This pre-training allows the model to learn to pick up on patterns in language and use them to predict the next probable word or words in a sequence. However, if an LLM picks only the most probable next word, it will lead to less creative responses. So LLMs are often given flexibility to pick from a range of reasonable, albeit slightly less probable, choices in order to generate more interesting responses. It’s worth noting that — although LLMs can at times perform well on factual prompts and create the impression of retrieving information — they are neither information databases nor deterministic information retrieval systems. So while a user can expect exactly the same and consistent response to a database query (one that is a literal retrieval of the information stored in it), the response from an LLM to the same prompt will not necessarily be the same every time (nor will it necessarily be a literal retrieval of the information it was trained on); all this is a result of the LLM’s underlying mechanism of predicting the next word. This is also an important factor in why LLMs can generate plausible-sounding but inaccurate responses about people and other topics — not ideal when factuality matters but potentially useful for generating creative or unexpected outputs.

Bard is part of our long-term, ongoing effort to develop LLMs responsibly, and throughout the course of this work, we have discovered and discussed several limitations associated with LLMs, including five areas we continue to work on:

  • Accuracy: Bard’s responses about people and other topics might be inaccurate, especially when asked about complex or factual issues.
  • Bias: Bard’s responses might reflect biases or perspectives about people or other topics present in its training data.
  • Persona: Bard’s responses might suggest it as having personal opinions or feelings.
  • False positives and false negatives: Bard might not respond to some appropriate prompts and provide inappropriate responses to others.
  • Vulnerability to adversarial prompting: users will find ways to stress test Bard further. For example, they may prompt Bard to hallucinate and provide inaccurate information about people and other topics.

These are areas we have focused on addressing before launching Bard and that we and the broader field continue to research. We at Google are committed to working to improve over time. Learn more.

Location information

What location information does Bard collect, why, and how is it used?

Location data is always collected if you use Bard so that Bard can provide you with a response that is relevant to your query. For example, to respond to prompts like "What's the weather?", Bard needs to know your location.

Where Bard gets location data & how its used

The source of the location data Bard collects varies. By default, Bard uses the general area from your IP address or the Home or Work addresses in your Google Account to give relevant responses to prompts like “What’s the weather?”

With your permission, Bard also processes precise location data from your device to provide more relevant responses. For example, Bard can use your precise location to more accurately respond to prompts like “where is the closest coffee shop to me?”

Google also uses your location data, including your precise location data, for the purposes and based on the legal grounds described in the Bard Privacy Notice. Learn more about location data at g.co/privacypolicy/location.

How precise location data is shared

If available, Bard may share your precise location data with another Google service, like Google Maps, to fulfill your request. The Google service that gets your location data uses it consistent with the Google Privacy Policy.

How location data is stored

  • Precise location is not stored in your Bard Activity.
  • Location data that Bard processes is coarsened to a general area before it’s stored with your Bard Activity. A general area is larger than 3 sq kilometers, and has at least 1000 users so that the general area of your Bard prompt does not identify you, helping to protect your privacy. This means that a general area is typically much larger than 3 sq kilometers outside of cities.

How to control & manage your data

At any time, you can:

How do I know if Bard has access to and is using my precise location?

Bard shows user-interface elements at the bottom of the Menu that offer continuous transparency about location data processed by Bard.

To check if Bard is accessing and using your precise location:

  1. Go to bard.google.com.
  2. At the top left, tap Menu .
  3. At the bottom of the menu, check the dot next to the location.
    • If the dot is blue, Bard has access to and is using your precise location.
    • If the dot is gray, Bard isn’t using your precise location.

Learn more about your location and how to manage it.

Uploaded files

How do I review and control my uploaded images?

You can review your uploaded images in your pinned and recent chats in Bard. You can delete your prompts, which also deletes any images you upload in those prompts, in your Bard Activity.

How does Google work with my uploaded images?

The images that you upload in your Bard prompts are interpreted using Google Lens technology. For example, Google Lens can interpret the pixels of an image as a jumping cat. That interpretation becomes part of your Bard prompt. Google uses this data just like any other Bard prompt, as explained in the Bard Privacy Notice.

At this time, we don't use the actual images that you upload or their pixels to improve our machine-learning technologies, unless those images are included in feedback. If you submit feedback on a Bard response, Google will include the images in your current conversation as part of your feedback and use this data like all other feedback you provide, as explained in more detail here.

In the future, as we work with images to provide new features and improve our services, we will be transparent if we change how your images are handled.

Extensions

What happens with my data when I use Bard Extensions?

Important: For now, extensions are available in English only.

Bard Extensions are Google services that work with Bard. They can better help you get things done with Bard.

What data is shared

To respond to you, Bard shares the following data with extensions that are on:

  • Information from your conversation
  • Preferences such as language and device type
  • Location information

How shared data is used

Information that’s shared with other Google services is used consistent with the Google Privacy Policy to:

  • Fulfill your request
  • Maintain Google’s technologies that power Bard’s integrations with extensions, such as APIs
  • Improve those services to better respond to you and other Google users

How shared data is deleted

Google services automatically delete this shared information when it’s no longer necessary for the purposes listed above, as explained in How Google retains data it collects. If you delete the relevant Bard conversation from your Bard activity, it doesn’t delete the shared information from the other services.

How to control & manage your data

  • You can turn off Extensions at any time in your Extensions settings in Bard.
  • If you turn off your Bard Activity, Extensions are turned off. If you turn on your Bard Activity, Extensions are turned back on.
What happens with my data when I use the Google Workspace Extension?

Important: For now, extensions are available in English only.

If you choose to connect Bard with Google Workspace, you can find information and get quick answers about your content in apps like Gmail, Docs, and Drive directly in Bard.

What data is shared

In addition to the data explained for Bard Extensions in general, Bard tells Google Workspace who you are so it can respond to your Workspace-related requests.

How data is used

Bard processes your personal data that it gets from Google Workspace, such as your name and email address, and your private content, like emails or docs you created or received, and uses it to:

  • Provide Bard features to you. For example:
    • Summarize your emails when you ask
    • Share content at your request
  • Maintain Bard services. For example:
    • Recover from service crashes
    • Measure overall user experience

Your personal content that Bard gets from Google Workspace is:

  • Not allowed to be accessed or reviewed by human reviewers
  • Not used to improve generative machine learning technologies that power Bard
  • Not used to show you ads
  • Not stored past the time period needed to provide and maintain Bard services

How shared data is deleted

To learn how shared data is deleted by Google Workspace, review data explained for Bard Extensions in general.

How to control & manage your data

  • You can turn off Google Workspace at any time in your Extensions settings in Bard.
  • You can change your Bard Activity setting.
    • If you turn off your Bard Activity, Extensions are turned off. If you turn on your Bard Activity, Extensions are turned back on.

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