Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
Data is the currency of the digital age, and people are more wary than ever of giving away too much of their personal info to Big Tech. So when we ran a poll about whether you would feel comfortable giving an AI chatbot your search history, we were a little surprised by the result.
Just to give some context about these results, Ryan Haines wrote about his experience handing over his search data to AI, and it was within his article that the poll was conducted. Despite his usual caution, Ryan opted to let Gemini access his search history in an experiment to see how personalization would affect its responses. He was keen to find out how much better the tailored answers would be, and he accepted that Gemini only uses the data when personalization is enabled. He was relatively impressed with the results, but the poll aimed to find out if you would be happy to make the same privacy sacrifice.
Would you feel comfortable giving an AI chatbot your search history?
Following thousands of responses to the survey, there is a small but definite lean towards feeling comfortable handing over your search results. Around 53.5% of you would be ok with it — a seven-point gap from those who don’t like the idea.
While this initially raised an eyebrow based on the privacy issues, there are a couple of factors that could be at play here. As we alluded to above, many of you responding to the poll may have been reassured after reading about Ryan’s relatively positive experience, although the poll was at the start of the article.
The more likely explanation is that we accept that the tech companies will get some of our data, so we’re happy enough to limit what that might be. You might be less inclined to hand over your social security or medical records to an AI chatbot, but your search history is a different matter. Your queries might be mostly trivial in scope, and they’re also something you already gave to a public search engine voluntarily. Like it or not, if chatbots and data servers are going to find it anyway, you might as well let it be used to give you more personalized AI responses.
There are some signs of this sentiment in the comments section of Ryan’s article. As user adamsparks92 wrote, “I’m sure it was already trained on all our Google data.”
