Data Privacy Considerations: Your Data, Your Rules
Understand where your data goes. The difference between Consumer (Free) and Enterprise (Paid) data usage policies in the Gemini ecosystem.
Data Privacy Considerations
The biggest fear enterprise customers have: "Is Google training on my data?"
The Rules
-
Consumer / Free Tier (AI Studio):
- Training: YES. Google may use de-identified data to improve models.
- Review: Human reviewers may read your prompts to fix safety filters.
- Guidance: Never put confidential data here.
-
Enterprise / Vertex AI (Paid):
- Training: NO. Google explicitly guarantees (contractually) that data is NOT used to train foundation models.
- Isolation: Your model adapter (fine-tune) stays in your project.
PII (Personally Identifiable Information)
Even on Enterprise tiers, you should minimize PII.
- Technique: Detect entities (Names, SSNs) and hash them before sending to API.
- Input:
User: sha256(John) asks... - Output:
Hello sha256(John)...-> Swap back to "John" in UI.
- Input:
Summary
If you are building a startup MVP, Free Tier is fine (if you warn users). If you are building a Banking App, you MUST use Vertex AI / Paid Tier.
In the next lesson, we discuss Access Management.