What Google's Terms Actually Say
Most people assume that marking a Google Doc as private means it stays private. The document sits in your Drive, untouched by outside eyes. That assumption is not supported by what Google's terms actually say.
Google's Privacy Policy has long included language permitting the company to use content you create or upload to "improve and develop" its services. In July 2023, Google updated that policy to add explicit language about AI training: the updated text states that Google uses information to "train Google's AI models." This was not a quiet clarification — it was a substantive change that drew scrutiny from privacy advocates, lawyers, and technology journalists worldwide.
The scope of this language is broad. Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, and files stored in Google Drive are all covered under the services to which you agreed when creating a Google account. The fact that you did not explicitly share a file does not remove it from the scope of the policy — you agreed to these terms at the account level, not at the file level.
"Google collects information to provide better services to all our users... including to improve and develop our services, and to train Google's AI models."
— Google Privacy Policy, 2023
What "Training AI" Really Means
When a company trains an AI model on your content, that content shapes the model's behavior. Your documents, their vocabulary, their structure, the way you phrase business decisions or describe personal matters — all of that becomes part of the statistical foundation of a system used by hundreds of millions of people.
Your documents become training data for Gemini and other Google AI products. A cover letter you wrote, a medical summary you kept in Docs, a legal agreement you drafted in Drive — these become inputs to a commercial product you have no stake in.
Use Google Drive — Without Google Reading Your Files
1Cryptor encrypts every file on your device before it reaches Google's servers. Filenames are encrypted too. Google indexes nothing, trains on nothing, and can read nothing. You keep the convenience of Drive without the privacy tradeoff.
Because filenames are also encrypted, Google cannot even index what your files are about. A file called "Q3 Acquisition Strategy.docx" becomes an opaque blob with a randomized identifier. Google's AI training pipeline receives no signal about the file's contents, purpose, or relationship to your other files.