Google has toyed with personalized answers in Gemini, but that was just a hint of what was to come. Today, the company is announcing extensive “personal intelligence” in Gemini that allows the chatbot to connect to Gmail, Photos, Search, and YouTube to craft more useful answers to your questions. If you don’t want Gemini to get to know you, there’s some good news. Personal intelligence is beginning as a feature for paid users, and it’s entirely optional.
By every measure, Google’s models are at or near the top of the AI heap. In general, the more information you feed into a generative AI, the better the outputs are. And when that data is personal to you, the resulting inference is theoretically more useful. Google just so happens to have a lot of personal data on all its users, so it’s relatively simple to feed that data into Gemini.
As Personal Intelligence rolls out over the coming weeks, AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers will see the option to connect those data sources. Each can be connected individually, so you might choose to allow Gmail access but block Photos, for example. When Gemini is allowed access to other Google products, it incorporates that data into its responses.
Google VP Josh Woodward claims that he’s already seeing advantages while testing the feature. When shopping for tires, Gemini referenced road trip photos to justify different suggestions and pulled the license plate number from a separate image.
Gemini will cite when it uses your personal data. If the personalized answer isn’t what you want, you can re-run any output without personalization. You may also use temporary chats to get the standard Gemini output without using your account data. Disabling access to one or all data sources in the settings is also always an option.
Google’s take on AI privacy
Perhaps sensing that feeding more data into Gemini would give many people the creeps, Google’s announcement explains at great length how the company has approached privacy in Personal Intelligence. Google isn’t getting any new information about you—your photos, email, and search behaviors are already stored on Google’s servers, so “you don’t have to send sensitive data elsewhere to start personalizing your experience.”
Having the chatbot regurgitate your photos and emails might still be a little unsettling, but Google claims it has built guardrails that keep Gemini from musing on sensitive topics. For example, the chatbot won’t use any health information it finds. However, you can still ask for it to look at that information explicitly.
Google also stresses that your personal data is “not directly used to train the model.” So the images or search habits it references in outputs are not used for training, but the prompts and resulting outputs may be used. Woodward notes that all personal data is filtered from training data. Put another way, the system isn’t trained to learn your license plate number, but it is trained to be able to locate an image containing your license plate.
This feature will be in beta for awhile as it rolls out, and it may take several weeks to reach all paid Gemini accounts. It will work across all Gemini endpoints, including the web, Android, and iOS.
Google also says it plans to expand access to Personal Intelligence in Gemini down the road. Unless Google flip-flops on the default settings, you can leave this feature disabled. That ensures Gemini won’t get additional access to your data, but of course, all that data is still sitting on Google’s servers. This probably won’t be the last time Google tries to entice you to plug your photos into an AI tool.
Balthazar codes (January 2026)