Welcome to the forefront of conversational AI as we explore the fascinating world of AI chatbots in our dedicated blog series. Discover the latest advancements, applications, and strategies that propel the evolution of chatbot technology. From enhancing customer interactions to streamlining business processes, these articles delve into the innovative ways artificial intelligence is shaping the landscape of automated conversational agents. Whether you’re a business owner, developer, or simply intrigued by the future of interactive technology, join us on this journey to unravel the transformative power and endless possibilities of AI chatbots.
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Tech > Services & Software > AI
Don't want big tech using your data to train its chatbots? Here are the settings you need to know about.
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October 1, 2026, 1:31 pm ET
Working with or using AI chatbots is becoming a normal thing these days and there’s a good chance that you’ve already dabbled with something like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or some other product out there. They can be more helpful than a standard search engine and give you important context to your question or whatever you’re looking into researching.
That said, most of these chatbots are keeping that context and even getting trained on your conversations, and depending on what you’re chatting about, that might not be the most ideal situation. A lot of the information that you’re giving to the chatbot is being stored on the parent companies’ servers, meaning tech giants like Google know exactly what you’ve been talking about. For the most part, this isn’t that big of a deal, but if you’re talking to a chatbot about things like your own personal health, that might not be something you want to have stashed away on a server, let alone have that information train the AI chatbot you’re using.
By default, most chatbots will use your conversation data for training purposes, but if you know where to look, you can usually turn this option off. Moreover, if you want to go the extra mile, you can even delete that data as well. If you want to prevent big tech from harvesting your data from your chatbot conversations, follow along.
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You’ll need to turn off a few settings in your Google account and in Gemini to prevent your data from being used to train AI models.
Turning off Web & App Activity will prevent your new searches, location and other data from being recorded to your Google account and used for AI training. However, turning this off does not delete the existing activity already on your account. You’ll still need to click the delete button on the same page and select to delete your data from either all time or your specified range.
Gemini has its own settings that you’ll need to disable in order to prevent Google from using your data for model training:
Similarly, you’ll also need to manually delete the existing Gemini activity (your conversations) by clicking the delete button and selecting a time range.
If you’re looking to remove your data or prevent Anthropic from using your data in Claude, it’s a little more straightforward.
Change Model Improvement settings:
While you’re here, you might also want to toggle the Location metadata off for good measure.
Deleting your conversations in Claude is also easy:
Per Anthropic’s privacy policy, deleted chats are stored for up to 30 days in its back-end systems. If you’ve previously allowed Anthropic to use your data, and you turn the setting off, new and existing chats won’t be used to train models going forward, but your data will be used in training that is in progress and won’t be removed from models that have already been trained.
ChatGPT is the world’s most-used chatbot. If you’ve been using it for a while without adjusting your settings, you’ve probably given OpenAI a lot of data.
Turn off model improvement in ChatGPT:
This pop-up menu contains two additional settings to include your audio and video recordings, but toggling the main switch at the top will disable both of these settings.
To delete all of your chats, there’s a dedicated button in the Data controls menu. Like Anthropic’s policy, OpenAI also stores deleted chats for up to 30 days.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
The TL;DR for trying to get Meta to stop using your data to train its AI is that there’s no guarantee. There’s no elegant solution, and you’ll have to submit a form, which Meta may take action on.
Making your profiles private and limiting your posts will shield you the most from AI training. Or you can just delete your Instagram and Facebook profiles.
Instagram users looking to get away from the fact that others can reuse their own media can opt out to avoid the deepfake apocalypse.
Aside from that, all else you can do is mute Meta AI.
I was unable to find the specific setting to get Meta to stop using your data, and Meta did not respond to a request for comment when asked for a guaranteed way to opt-out of AI model training.
It’s almost surprising that Grok will allow you to turn off AI model training on X, but you can. Here’s how.
Uncheck the box next to “Allow your public data as well as your interactions, inputs, and results with Grok and XAI to be used for training and fine-tuning.”
While you’re at it, you might want to uncheck Allow X to personalize your experience with Grok and Allow Grok to remember your conversation history. You can also choose to delete your conversation history with Grok in this menu.
There are plenty of other AI tools that you may need to do this for if you’re a habitual user. We’ll continue to add to them here over time. The settings may be a bit obscured and hard to find, but if the option is there, you’ll typically find it in the data or privacy settings of the selected chatbot.
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