Like nearly everything else on the Internet, your requests will leave a trail of breadcrumbs. Questions directed at Siri and Google’s voice search get sent to their respective companies, paired with unique device IDs that aren’t connected to specific users. Apple stores Siri requests with device IDs for six months, and then deletes the ID and keeps the audio for another 18 months; Google’s retention policy wasn’t immediately available.

When saved queries—and often, associated location data—are connected to user accounts, they can paint a very accurate picture of users’ habits, travels, and preferences. Often, that’s a great thing: Google Now wouldn’t be able to return stunningly useful results without being able to read your email and dip into your search history. Detailed voice-search history also allows companies to learn user’s vocal idiosyncrasies and teach them to understand spoken requests better. But the resulting data-portraits are also available to law enforcement officers who come knocking with a subpoena in hand—there are ways to extract a particular iOS device’s Siri identifier—and they can be stolen by hackers who gain access to sensitive servers.

It’s not too surprising that the questions you lob at Siri are being recorded and stored, at least for a while. We generally expect our search history to be catalogued, and asking a digital assistant to conduct a search for you is just one step removed from doing it yourself. But with its next-generation assistant, Google is promising to bring its know-it-all artificial intelligence platform even to conversations you’re having with other people. That means that Google can capture a wealth of new information, and from a setting that feels inherently more private.

Google is releasing new chat platform called Allo this summer, and its flagship feature is a search assistant that’s always waiting in the wings for a chance to help. If a friend messages you to ask if you want to check out a bar downtown tonight, Google will hop in to suggest a few good ones. If you receive a photo of an infant, Google will suggest that you reply “awwww” or “cute!” One tap and Google sends one of those canned responses for you.

How convenient! Except, as Motherboard’s Jason Koebler pointed out last week, when you really think about it, Allo’s marquee feature is the fact that it’s listening in to your conversations. So far, that fact seems only to have drawn the ire of the privacy community (including, of course, Edward Snowden)—a far cry from the mass panic set off more than a decade ago by Gmail ads based on email content.

For the artificial-intelligence component of Allo to work, Google’s servers need to be able to listen to your conversations—so Google chose not to protect messages sent on Allo by default with end-to-end encryption, a strong security protocol that only allows a message’s sender and recipient to decode the contents of a message.