Google’s in-house artificial intelligence service, Gemini AI, has been apparently reading private Google Drive documents without obtaining the user’s explicit permission, according to a shocking revelation made by a Senior Advisor on AI Governance and X user Kevin Bankster (via Tom’s Hardware).
Updated with Google’s response:
Google has denied such claims. A Google spokesperson reached out to techworm and said,
“Our generative AI features are designed to give users choice and keep them in control of their data. Using Gemini in Google Workspace requires a user to proactively enable it, and when they do their content is used in a privacy-preserving manner to generate useful responses to their prompts, but is not otherwise stored without permission.”
“In this instance, it sounds like the user was previously using Gemini via the side panel in Google Drive for PDFs and wished to no longer do so, which can simply be done by closing the side panel.”
User claims before Google’s comment are as below:
Kevin said that after opening a tax return document as a PDF in Google Docs, the Gemini AI provided a summary of his taxes immediately without even giving any information or asking the AI to do so.
On further investigation, it was found that the issue only affected PDFs.
Just pulled up my tax return in @Google Docs–and unbidden, Gemini summarized it. So…Gemini is automatically ingesting even the private docs I open in Google Docs? WTF, guys. I didn't ask for this. Now I have to go find new settings I was never told about to turn this crap off.
— Kevin Bankston (@KevinBankston) July 10, 2024
While the privacy settings that are used to inform Gemini should have been publicly available, they were not.
Kevin was eventually able to find the correct setting with the help of another X user, only to his surprise that the option was already disabled for Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Drive.
This meant that Gemini AI should not be accessing the documents in Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Drive and summarizing them.
Also, the settings switch was in an entirely different location than where Gemini’s bot had initially directed him.
“The AI is either “hallucinating (lying)” or some internal systems on Google’s servers are outright malfunctioning. Either way, not a great look, even if this private data supposedly isn’t used to train the Gemini AI,” Kevin wrote about the surprising interaction with the AI assistant on his X account.
Kevin believes that the problem may have been caused due to the enabling of Google Workspace Labs that he had registered for in 2023, which could be superseding the intended Gemini AI settings.
However, in a subsequent tweet, he shared how to disable Gemini from reading data on Google Drive by toggling off Gemini extensions.
Thank you @missmwilliams! The setting *does* exist (albeit not where Gemini said). But the punchline is in the next tweet… https://t.co/t5kPvIP6vp
— Kevin Bankston (@KevinBankston) July 10, 2024
Google mentions in a blog post how they protect Google workspace data in the era of the generative era.
They do not use Workspace data to train or improve the underlying generative AI and large language models that power Bard [now Gemini], Search, and other systems outside of Workspace without permission.
