Gemini

Where does your data go?

Your conversations go to Google's cloud — along with your location, which Gemini collects on every use. The training rule:

• With Keep Activity on (the default), your chats train Google's models. Turn it off and future chats aren't used for training — but they're still saved 72 hours, and Google still processes them for safety and to create anonymized data regardless of your settings.
• Human reviewers read a subset of chats — and those chats are kept up to three years even after you delete your activity. Google disconnects them from your account but keeps them. This is the single most important line in this review.
• Auto-delete defaults to 18 months — adjustable to 3 months, 36, or off. Set it to 3 the day you sign up.
• Workspace (work/school) accounts: your settings are controlled by the administrator, not you.

What happens when it's wrong?

Same benchmark story as the other two, with one standout positive and one surprise:

• Document summarization — the small model is the careful one. Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite posts 3.3% on Vectara's grounded leaderboard, near the top of the entire board. The flagship 3.1 Pro scored 10.4% — worse than its own budget sibling.
• Facts from memory — middling. No published SimpleQA-caliber number, and no Gemini entry leads the AA-Omniscience accuracy lists (Claude leads abstention, OpenAI's newest leads raw accuracy).
• The practical upside: Gemini is wired into Google Search, so real-world answers usually arrive pre-grounded — the same mitigation that pulls ChatGPT's error rate from 47% to roughly 10%.

What's it actually bad at?

• Model selection is on you. The flagship hallucinates more than the budget model on the same task — the default assumption that newest means most accurate actively backfires here.
• A sprawling data surface. Gemini Live audio and video, Connected Apps, imported chats, NotebookLM sources — each with its own retention rule. The privacy settings page is the longest of the three tools reviewed.
• Location data is collected on every use — no opt-out described in the privacy notice.
• Workspace users don't control their own settings. Admin territory.

What does it cost really?

The traps: these plans are bundles — you're buying Google One storage and YouTube Premium along with the AI, which makes price comparisons against ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro misleading. And "Gemini Pro" as most people mean it is Google AI Pro at $19.99; the naming ladder confuses this constantly. Annual billing now exists on all paid plans (new for 2026). Workspace seats run roughly $7–22/user/month with Gemini included — if your business runs on Google Workspace, check whether you already have it.

What does it replace — and what do you still do?

Same drafting coverage as the other two, with a genuine edge where your work already lives in Google: drafting in Gmail and Docs, summarizing Drive files, spreadsheet help in Sheets. You still own: factual verification, final judgment, and anything customer-facing. The suite integration is the real product — Gemini as a standalone chatbot is the weaker reason to choose it.

What the ecosystem offers

• Gemini Enterprise (2026) — for teams: you can build your own assistants without code, set them running on schedules, and watch them from one dashboard. It works with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 files, and connects to partner tools like Salesforce and Adobe.
• Safety plumbing for businesses: every assistant gets its own identity and permissions, there's protection against prompt-injection tricks, and admins see everything. If you don't need this layer, it costs you nothing to ignore.
• Compliance stack (on Workspace business editions): HIPAA, GDPR, SOC, FedRAMP — the certifications regulated industries need. Worth noting: Gemini in Chrome is separately scoped and loses most of those certifications.
• Models change monthly: three new Flash releases in six weeks, with introductory pricing that expires in December. There's also a cybersecurity-tuned model available only to vetted organizations. Practical takeaway: if you're budgeting, re-check prices — they change.
• Consumer vs Workspace: business editions get real data protections (no human review, no training); the personal app does not, and its history defaults to 18 months.

If I stop paying, what do I lose?

• Export: yes, self-serve — via Google Takeout, covering Gemini chats and Gems. A clunky multi-step flow, but complete.
• The catch the export page admits: downloading your data doesn't delete it from Google's servers. Export is a copy, not an exit.
• Deletion: self-serve and granular — by day, range, or all-time in Gemini Apps Activity. But reviewed chats ride out your deletion for up to three years, disconnected from your account.
• Downgrade: clean — cancel and the account reverts to Free, with the usual Google One storage wrinkle.
• The lock-in reality: the real exit cost isn't Gemini, it's Google — email, files, photos. Nobody leaves Gemini. People leave Google, rarely.

Who is this NOT for?

Anyone whose data discipline matters more than convenience — the three-year reviewer retention and the location collection are disqualifying for regulated work. Also not for anyone who wants a clean, single-purpose tool: Gemini's value is the Google constellation around it, and if you're not in that constellation, the other two reviews make stronger cases.