This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, January 14th, 2026. We tell you what you need to know. We give you important context. Gosh, dart it. We're trying to help each other understand, okay? Okay. Today, Gemini wants to get personal, Tom, but should we let it? I don't know. It's a big step. I'm Tom Merritt.

And I'm Sarah Lane. Let's start with what you need to know with the big story.

So Google now offers a feature in Gemini called Personal Intelligence that can customize responses to you if you turn it on. It is off by default. That is important to

repeat. It is off by default. I think a lot of people will probably assume that it's on by default,

but it's not. If you turn it on, it will then proactively include information from your Gmail,

Google Photos, Google Search, and YouTube History when it thinks it might help it answer or give a better response.

You can choose which of those it can access.

You don't have to turn them all on.

It's not all or nothing.

You can say just do photos or just do Gmail.

And this is different than the access of give it access to Gmail.

So if I ask it specifically to go into Gmail and do something, it will do it.

This is proactively.

You say, you can access this whenever you need.

So it might go in and find a specific detail in your email because you asked about something without saying go find it in my email.

It might find something in a photo or when it's using its reasoning model.

It could benefit from a more complex response drawn across multiples of those sources.

Google says that they are not training on your personal data. This is just inferencing.

They are just referencing it when you ask about certain things. It's going and looking at it.

VP of Gemini, Josh Woodard, gave the example of using it in a tire shop. Apparently,

he was in a tire shop, didn't know his car tire size, asked Gemini. Gemini went and looked at his

Google photos and then proactively suggested getting all weather tiles, tires, since it noticed

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