According to a revelation from Kevin Bankster on Twitter, it appears that Google’s Gemini AI service is now reading private Drive documents without explicit user consent as part of the larger tech industry’s push toward AI, whether we like it or not.
Bankster continues to explain why this might be broken for users specifically like him. Still, the complete lack of control being given over his private, sensitive information is unconscionable for a Google-sized company — and it does not augur well for future privacy issues with AI’s frequently enforced rollout.
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What precisely is happening here, then? After going into much more depth in the discussion, Kevin Bankston has some suggestions, but neither Google support nor the Gemini AI itself seems to know for sure.
Even though the original post said otherwise, this is occurring under the greater domain of Google Drive rather than just Google Docs, but it appears that Docs may also be affected.
But what was the root of this problem? The privacy settings that Google’s Gemini AI used to train itself should be publicly accessible, but they aren’t, therefore either the AI is “hallucinating (lying)” or some internal processes on Google’s servers are broken. In any case, not a good look, even though the Gemini AI isn’t meant to be trained using this sensitive data.
Furthermore, when Bankston finally located the aforementioned settings option, he discovered that Gemini summaries in Gmail, Drive, and Docs had already been turned off. Moreover, it was located in a completely different location than either of the web pages that Gemini’s bot had originally directed.
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According to Bankston, the problem appears to be specific to Google Drive and appears only after at least one document has been clicked using the Gemini button. Google Gemini will then be automatically activated for any subsequent files of the same type accessed within Google Drive if the matching document type (in this case, PDF) is found.
Moreover, he speculates that it might have been brought on by him turning on Google Workspace Labs in 2023, which might have overridden the planned Gemini AI settings.
This is a serious drawback for having assisted Google in testing their newest technology, even if it is limited to Google Workspace Labs members. Granular consent from users is still important, especially when it comes to potentially sensitive data, and Google has completely let down at least one group of users by abandoning this idea.
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