Google Splits “Web & App Activity” Settings, Launches New “Search Services History”

Mountain View, California — Check your inbox. If you haven’t received the notification yet, you almost certainly will in the next few days. Google has started blast-emailing users about a supposedly user-friendly “upgrade” to their privacy settings.

But if you actually take the time to read the fine print—which, let’s be honest, almost nobody does—you’ll realize the search giant is pulling off a classic corporate bait-and-switch. Under the banner of giving you “even more control” over your data, Google is splitting up its tracking settings.

In doing so, they are quietly auto-enrolling millions of users into a new setting that saves your personal photos, files, and voice recordings to train their hungry AI models.

Here’s the deal. Previously, almost everything you searched, clicked, or looked up on a Google service was filed away under a massive, catch-all database setting known as Web & App Activity. Going forward, Google is killing that unified setting.

Instead, they are introducing two new distinct toggles: Search Services History and Personalized Recommendations.

According to the update, these settings will apply across their entire ecosystem, including Google Search, Maps, Shopping, Hotels, Flights, Translate, and Google News.

On the surface, separating your search history from your personalized recommendation algorithm sounds like a win for consumer choice. But the real kicker is buried deep in the explanation of the new Search Services History setting.

Because people are increasingly searching in non-traditional ways—like snapping a photo of a plant with Google Lens or using voice commands—this new history setting now includes a subsetting called Save Media.

And what exactly counts as “media” in Google’s eyes? Pretty much everything. We are talking about your private images, uploaded files, audio clips, and video interactions.

Here is the real catch: if you currently have “Web & App Activity” turned on in your Google Account, Google is going to automatically turn on the new “Save Media” setting for you during the transition.

Oh, and they aren’t just saving these photos and voice snippets so you can look back at your search history. The notification explicitly states that your saved media will be “used to develop and improve Google services and technologies, including AI models.”

Let’s translate that from corporate PR speak: Google is using your visual and auditory search queries as free training data for Gemini and their other artificial intelligence projects.

To be fair, Google does apply what they call “robust privacy and security protections” to this data, and your existing auto-delete preferences (like wiping your history every 3 or 18 months) will carry over to the new settings.

You can also manually delete individual photos or voice files from your activity log. But the fact remains that millions of users are about to be opted into a media-harvesting pipeline by default, simply because they had their standard search history enabled.

If you aren’t keen on having your family photos or voice notes sitting on a server in Mountain View to help Google build better algorithms, you need to take action. Once the update hits your account, head straight to your Google Account Activity Controls page.

From there, you can toggle off “Save Media” while keeping your basic text search history intact. It takes two minutes, and frankly, your digital footprint will thank you for it.