Katie Notopoulos, reporting for Business Insider regarding Google possibly scraping Google Docs for use as training data for Gemini, Google’s artificial intelligence chatbot:

A representative for Google confirmed to Business Insider that simply changing the share settings to “anyone with the link” did not mean that a document was “public” and would be used for AI training.

To be “publicly available,” that document would need to be posted on a website or shared on social media. Basically, some kind of web crawler would need to be able to find it. That can’t happen with a file just emailed back and forth between two people — like if you send your friend a link over Gmail, for instance, Google said.

Breathe a sigh of relief.

I still think this is mildly disingenuous since there is no way to opt out of AI training, unlike on a traditional website, where disallowing AI crawlers to index the page is as simple as adding a line to the website’s robots.txt file. And, not to mention, there is no clarification in either Google Docs’ privacy policy or terms of use on how Google might use your documents to train its AI models. I hope Google makes improvements and clarifies its policy in the near future. But for now, unless you’re publicly publishing a Google Doc to the web, there is no need to worry.