Ten minutes, once
Settings pages are dull and most people never open them, which is a shame, because there are only a handful here worth your attention and they are the ones that decide what happens to everything you type.
Two places hold them. Inside Gemini itself there is a settings menu, usually behind an icon at an edge of the screen. Separately, your Google account has pages covering the activity Google keeps across its services, and Gemini appears among them. Google rearranges both regularly, so look for the words rather than following any remembered route. Search your account settings for activity, or for Gemini, and you will land close enough.
In plain English
- Activity:
- The stored record of what you have asked and what came back. Keeping it is what lets you reopen old conversations.
- Auto delete:
- A setting that clears things older than a chosen period automatically, so you never have to remember to tidy up.
- Human review:
- A person, or an automated system, looking at a sample of conversations to help improve the service. It is not someone watching you.
- Administrator:
- The person at an employer or college who decides what your work account can do. Their settings override yours.
The four worth knowing
Whether your conversations are kept at all. There is a control governing whether your Gemini activity is stored. Leaving it on means your past chats stay available to reopen. Turning it off means more privacy and less convenience, and a limited record may still be kept for a short period for safety and service reasons. Neither choice is the correct one. It depends entirely on what you use it for.
How long it is kept. If you do keep your activity, look for an option to delete anything older than a chosen length of time. This is the setting most worth changing, because it gives you tidiness without asking you to remember anything ever again.
How to look at and clear what is there. You can review your history and delete individual conversations or the lot. Worth doing once simply to see what accumulates. Most people find it more mundane than they feared, which is itself reassuring.
What the review terms actually say. Samples of conversations can be looked at, by people or by automated systems, to improve these tools. This is why every honest guide says the same thing: do not type anything into any AI assistant that you would not want a stranger to read. Not because a stranger is reading, but because that rule keeps you safe without needing to understand the fine print.
Practical version of all this. No passwords. No card or bank details. No identification numbers. No medical records belonging to somebody else. No confidential documents from work unless your employer has said it is permitted. Everything else is ordinarily fine.
On a work or school account, an administrator sets the terms, and those settings sit above yours. That is usually good news, since organisational accounts often come with stronger data terms, but it does mean your personal choices may be limited or made for you.
Your capstone: a prompt pack of your own
Here is the last exercise, and it lives entirely outside this website. There is no account here, nothing is stored here, and nothing about your work is sent anywhere. That is deliberate.
Open a notes app, a document, or a paper notebook, whichever you will actually open again. Build yourself a small collection of prompts you can paste when you need them. Four or five is plenty. The point is not to have a library. The point is to stop facing a blank box on a day when you are tired.
Start with these, then change the words until they sound like your life rather than an example.
Here is a message I received. Explain in plain English what it is asking me to do, by when, and what happens if I do nothing. Then draft a short reply in my words: polite, clear, no more apologetic than necessary.
Here is something long that I have to read. Give me the five things that matter, then anything in it that would cost me money, time or trouble if I missed it.
I need to say something awkward to someone I care about. Here is the situation and here is what I want the outcome to be. Give me three versions: one gentle, one direct, one somewhere in between. Do not explain them, just show me the three.
Ask me one question at a time until you have enough to help me properly with the following task. Do not start until you have stopped asking.
That fourth one is quietly the most powerful thing in this course. It reverses the direction of the conversation, and it rescues you on the days when you know you need help but cannot articulate with what.
Add one line to the top of your pack: the sentence you say most often at work or at home. That sentence is almost certainly a prompt waiting to be written down.
Finish this and the Gemini Starter badge is yours. More usefully, you now have a settings page you have actually looked at and a short list of prompts that fit your life, which is more than most people who have been using these tools for a year.
Checkpoint
Decide whether your conversations are kept, set them to clear themselves after a period you choose, look at your history once, and keep a short prompt pack somewhere you will find it again.
๐ Quiz
Question 1 of 4Which setting gives you tidiness without having to remember anything?