Google Tightens Control Over Gemini Conversation Data

Google is giving Workspace administrators more control over Gemini’s temporary chats and conversation-deletion features.

IT teams can now decide whether employees are allowed to start temporary conversations or remove past chats, addressing concerns around data retention and regulatory compliance.

Temporary Chats

Temporary chats allow users to have Gemini conversations that do not appear in their chat history. The feature can be useful when employees want to ask a sensitive or one-time question without keeping it in their visible conversation list.

Users can also manually delete individual conversations or their entire chat history when their administrator allows it.

Admin Controls

Workspace administrators can enable or disable both features across an entire company domain. They can also apply different rules to specific organisational units or groups, allowing companies to set separate policies for departments or teams.

This gives IT departments more control over how employees manage Gemini conversation data.

Compliance Concerns

Unrestricted deletion can create problems for companies required to retain communications under legal or industry rules.

Temporary chats and manual deletion may reduce the information visible to users, but organisations still need records for compliance, audits or legal investigations.

Google’s new controls allow companies to balance user privacy with their data-retention requirements.

Google Vault

Google Vault retention rules take priority when an organisation uses Vault for Gemini. In these cases, a deleted conversation may disappear from the employee’s view but remain stored according to the organisation’s retention policy.

Temporary chats may also be logged and retained under the same rules. Gemini will inform users that their activity may still be visible to Workspace administrators or Vault users.

Rollout

The administrator controls began rolling out in mid-June. End-user access is scheduled to follow, with the features expected to reach all Google Workspace customers by June 28.