No. They provided me a nice little button that allows me to disable Gemini, and they have allowed me to opt out of any usage. So again. Show me that it is still active after I have disabled it.

Let’s say I install a button on your car that flips from “broken” to “fixed” my itself. Anytime you complain something is wrong, I flip that switch to “fixed.” That doesn’t change anything. The switch just tells other things to do something. It doesn’t enforce anything. It’s basically telling Google whether you want it or not, not actually obeying you.

I was curious so I searched. This is the best info I could find. 

https://proton.me/blog/turn-off-gemini-on-android

Proton claims that even if you turn everything off, it will still watch in the background because Google is replacing assistant with Gemini. That still hasn't happened on my phone. I can still use the regular Google assistant, but I feel like I'm not smart enough to evaluate the claims to know whether it is really running on my phone or not.

Proton also has a profit motive in making people upset with Google, so I don't know.

The first one does tell you how to "completely remove Gemini from your smartphone" under that heading. I do not have the Gemini app installed.

The second one says:

Can you fully disable Gemini on Android?

No, and that’s by design. While you can turn off activity tracking, revoke permissions, and even uninstall the Gemini app on some devices, Google is actively replacing its Assistant app with Gemini.

But, I've also disabled Google Assistant across all applications, so I don't share data with Gemini/Assistant. I had to lose some features to do so.

Overall, your reply serves to confirm for me that I have disabled Gemini on both of my Android devices. Still, I appreciate the links!

Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me either way. There IS a lot of telemetry and other BS that is definitely still on my phone, included in OS updates, and not uninstallable (I can "uninstall updates", but that would also give me back any security issues). But, I don't think that it is Gemini, or at least predates that naming convention.

To get free of Google telemetry, I'd have to install a non-Google ROM, and I haven't ever tried that.

Telemetry certainly can be abused, and Google should be legally (by regulation) required to provide a simple opt-out. BUT, telemetry really is a fairly normal thing to include in "web-scale" deployments and is primarily used to discover issues that have escaped into production without affecting a testing environment--or, at least, that what the telemetry systems I've interacted with as an software developer were for. So, I'm not too worried about non-personalized data collection.

EDIT: I confirmed that Google says I have no Gemini activity to delete, so while I'm sure my phone is reporting stuff, it's not to Gemini.