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Artificial Intelligence Google's Gemini AI caught scanning Google Drive hosted PDF files without permission -- user complains feature can't be disabled News By Christopher Harper published 14 July 2024 Kevin Bankston, a Senior Advisor on AI Governance, discusses this concerning Google Gemini behavior. * * * * * * * Comments (19) When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here's how it works. Google Gemini Advanced (Image credit: Google) As part of the wider tech industry's wider push for AI, whether we want it or not, it seems that Google's Gemini AI service is now reading private Drive documents without express user permission, per a report from Kevin Bankster on Twitter embedded below. While Bankster goes on to discuss reasons why this may be glitched for users like him in particular, the utter lack of control being given over his sensitive, private information is unacceptable for a company of Google's stature --and does not bode well for future privacy concerns amongst AI's often-forced rollout. 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.July 10, 2024 So, what exactly is going on here? Both Google support and the Gemini AI itself do not quite seem to know, but Kevin Bankston has some theories, after providing much more detail in the full thread. Contrary to the initial posting, this is technically happening within the larger umbrella of Google Drive and not Google Docs specifically, though it seems likely the issue could apply to Docs as well. * Amazon Prime Day: See the latest deals on tech But what caused this issue? According to Google's Gemini AI, the privacy settings used to inform Gemini should be openly available, but they aren't, which means 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. What's more, Bankston did eventually find the settings toggle in question... only to find that Gemini summaries in Gmail, Drive, and Docs were already disabled. Additionally, it was in an entirely different place than either of the web pages to which Gemini's bot initially pointed. For Bankston, the issue seems localized to Google Drive, and only happens after pressing the Gemini button on at least one document. The matching document type (in this case, PDF) will subsequently automatically trigger Google Gemini for all future files of the same type opened within Google Drive. He additionally theorizes that it may have been caused by him enabling Google Workspace Labs back in 2023, which could be overriding the intended Gemini AI settings. Even if this issue is isolated to Google Workspace Labs users, it's quite a severe downside for having helped Google test its latest and greatest tech. User consent still matters on a granular basis, particularly with potentially sensitive information, and Google has utterly failed at least one segment of its user base by failing to stay true to that principle. Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. [ ][ ]Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands[ ]Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors[Sign me up] By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over. Christopher Harper Christopher Harper Social Links Navigation Contributing Writer Christopher Harper has been a successful freelance tech writer specializing in PC hardware and gaming since 2015, and ghostwrote for various B2B clients in High School before that. Outside of work, Christopher is best known to friends and rivals as an active competitive player in various eSports (particularly fighting games and arena shooters) and a purveyor of music ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Killer Mike to the Sonic Adventure 2 soundtrack. More about artificial intelligence Goldman Sachs flag Goldman Sachs says AI is too expensive and unreliable -- firm asks if 'overhyped' AI processing will ever pay off massive investments AI Chatbot Former Tesla AI Director reproduces GPT-2 in 24 hours for only $672 -- GPT-4 costs $100 million to train Latest Real Deals These AMD Radeon 7000-series graphics cards have dropped to all-time low prices ahead of Prime Day See more latest > TOPICS Google See all comments (19) [ ] 19 Comments Comment from the forums * Math Geek this is not really a "just started doing it" type of thing. google has ALWAYS read anything and everything you hosted with them. gmail, chrome, cloud storage, anything on your android phone, plus all the 3rd party data they buy and scrape as well such as health/financial records and anything else they can get their hands on. i personally hate it 100% but i'm sure the rest of the commenters here will just say "apple/MS/facebook/twitter/etc/etc/etc all do it, so it's ok" as if the fact everyone is spying on you somehow makes it ok ?!?!? Reply * ezst036 Users who store their data with Google are fools. Reply * purposelycryptic Math Geek said: this is not really a "just started doing it" type of thing. google has ALWAYS read anything and everything you hosted with them. gmail, chrome, cloud storage, anything on your android phone, plus all the 3rd party data they buy and scrape as well such as health/financial records and anything else they can get their hands on. i personally hate it 100% but i'm sure the rest of the commenters here will just say "apple/MS/facebook/twitter/etc/ etc/etc all do it, so it's ok" as if the fact everyone is spying on you somehow makes it ok ?!?!? Very few people think it's ok, but the vast majority don't really see any alternative that is truly viable for them. If you have a smart phone, you have a Google or Apple account. If you have a PC, only a small percentage of the general population are even aware that you can run Windows without a Microsoft account. People have just been bombarded with so many privacy violations that they've grown numb to it. If they got upset and angry every time, they would end up being upset and angry all the time. For better or worse, the human brain adapts to and normalizes almost any kind of long-term conditions, good or bad - you can't really avoid hedonic adaptation. You win the lottery, you get really, really happy for a little while, then you get used to it, and it just becomes the new normal; if your previous financial situation was stressful and impacted your happiness negatively, you will probably be less stressed and unhappy, but you'll still end up somewhere around your neutral baseline before long. Your privacy gets invaded and abused on a daily basis, you get seriously upset and angry. But if it keeps happening, and you see no effective way of stopping it, you won't be able to maintain that rage for any significant amount of time, and eventually, you just get used to it and accept it as normal. Remember when Windows 10 came out, and how ridiculously angry everyone, myself included, was about the forced telemetry and forced OS updates that you not only couldn't refuse, but that would self-install and reboot your computer? I sure as hell do, and I stayed away from Windows 10 for as long as possible, and then used various tools to disable as much of that BS as I could - I didn't start actively using Windows 10 until this year, when I inherited a PC that had it installed. And yet now, with it being set to go EOL next year, all anyone can talk about is how great Windows 10 is, and how they don't want to move to Windows 11 because it is so horrible. They've all forgotten about the incredible amount of BS Windows 10 forced on them, because, to them, it simply became the new normal. People's values are terrifyingly malleable. Expose them to anything for long enough, and they just accept it as normal, and barely actively notice the change in day to day life, whether it's incredibly beneficial to them, or incredibly harmful. Everything gets normalized. It's a key part of how we maintain a functional existence without breaking down and going insane, but it has a lot of issues, especially when other humans decide to take advantage of it. Reply * mac_angel Ai doing something without permission? If only someone could have warned us about this sooner. Reply * thisisaname Do they sanity check any of the documents before they train on them or is this a easy way to influence these AIs? Reply * watzupken mac_angel said: Ai doing something without permission? If only someone could have warned us about this sooner. The fact is the company and the creator does this, and so something inherent to it. You get caught, so pretend to be surprised and blame it on the AI that went rouge. Files stored in the cloud are never safe for the company that's hosting it. Reply * Alvar "Miles" Udell Guess he should have used Microsoft 365 and not Google Docs. Reply * slightnitpick mac_angel said: Ai doing something without permission? If only someone could have warned us about this sooner. Oh the AI has permission all right. Just not from the end user. The coders and administrators at Alphabet gave it permission. Reply * slightnitpick purposelycryptic said: And yet now, with it being set to go EOL next year, all anyone can talk about is how great Windows 10 is, and how they don't want to move to Windows 11 because it is so horrible. They've all forgotten about the incredible amount of BS Windows 10 forced on them, because, to them, it simply became the new normal. I'm not going around saying that Windows 10 is great. I'm just saying that it's tolerable. Reply * OLDKnerd purposelycryptic said: You win the lottery, you get really, really happy for a little while, then you get used to it, and it just becomes the new normal I think i would be really really happy for the rest of my life, CUZ every day when i woke up i would NOT hear mu native tongue CUZ i would be in a country far far away, and that is reason to be happy, even if i have realized that no matter where i relocate to, that country also have a lot of " Russia ",,,,,, Russia in my new word for bat poop crazy. But i would be able to cope CUZ i have gone there by myself, and as a new comer i would not be very much engaged with my new country as it would take a while to really take in things, and i do not expect to live for a whole lot longer. Also just CUZ i moved to a new place, its not like i would get a phone and a TV again, i am way past those addictions. I HATE government involvement as it is rarely any good, but i would like for my country to ban ALL google services,,,, and other like them of course. 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