Down with Gemini!

When you start working with Gemini within your Google Workspace, completely different privacy rules apply than when you use the free consumer version of Gemini. The good news is that Google treats business data with strict 'enterprise-grade' security, but that also means your IT administrator* is in control.

We regularly receive questions from customers asking if they can delete their chat history. There are things you might prefer to keep to yourself (like when you ask silly questions or momentarily forgot the grammar rules), but it is, of course, a professional context... Here's an overview of what your privacy entails, what your boss can see, and how long everything is retained.

What exactly can the employer (the admin) see?

The most important nuance is that no one can just read along live with what you type in Gemini. Your chats are basically only visible to you. However, the organization's IT administrator does have backdoor access to the (meta)data through the central Google Workspace Admin environment. (We will conveniently overlook the legal context here for now.)

• Reporting and audit logs: The administrator has access to the so-called Gemini for Workspace log events. These are purely technical security logs. In these, the admin only sees metadata: who logged in, when a prompt was sent, and which functionality was used. The exact content of your chat is normally not included here.

• Google Vault: If your organization uses Google Vault (which we recommend!) where Gemini is stored in eDiscovery, an administrator can retrieve, search, and export your complete chat history (prompts and answers), unless your organization specifically disables this in the retention rules for Vault.

• Only for Enterprise: Companies that have Data Loss Prevention (DLP) built-in can do a bit more. This digital security system triggers warnings and acts as an automatic filter to prevent sensitive company information from accidentally or intentionally leaking out. For example, as soon as you prompt credit card numbers, IBAN account numbers, or passport numbers, etc., the admin will temporarily gain insight into the content to investigate the security incident, thanks to the so-called 'snippet'. The admin sees in their security dashboard the exact text that triggered the filter, including approximately 100 characters of surrounding text for context.

Delete your history yourself

Do you find all of this scary and want to be able to delete your chats at will? You can, but it entirely depends on the settings your IT administrator has chosen. Our advice? Have an open conversation in these new AI times and agree together on what should be saved and what should not...

• Default setting: Recently, manual deletion by users is enabled by default. You can then delete individual chats or your entire history in your Gemini view via your own activity screen. N.B. This is still different from the auto delete setting, which is set by the administrator and is a minimum of 72 hours.

• Restriction: The administrator can also centrally disable this option for everyone or certain Organizational Units. If so, you will see a notification that "manual deletion of chats has been blocked by the organization." Your chats are then considered official company documents that must be retained. Deletion is then not possible.

• Extra tip? Is the full conversation not confidential in principle, but do you have an embarrassing follow-up question just for yourself? Then you can choose "branch in new chat" at the bottom. The conversation will then be duplicated, and you can jump from one to the other to keep separate matters separate. Deleting one chat is possible (if the settings allow it, cf. supra), while the other chat is retained!

Keep it private