Google's Gemini AI found to be silently scanning PDF files hosted in Google Drive — users complain they can't disable the feature

As the push for AI grows across the tech industry, whether we like it or not, it appears that Google's Gemini AI service is reading private Drive documents without users' explicit permission. This was reported by Kevin Bankster on Twitter, embedded below. Bankster further discusses why this is a problem, especially for users like him, but being given absolutely no control over his sensitive and private information is unacceptable for a large company like Google. It's also unlikely to raise privacy concerns in the future as the forced adoption of AI becomes more common.

@I opened my tax return in Google Docs and Gemini just summarized it for me. Does that mean Gemini is automatically pulling in private documents I open in Google Docs too? What the hell? I didn't ask for this. To turn this crap off I have to find a new setting that I was never told about. July 10, 2024

Neither Google Support nor Gemini AI itself seem to be too clear, but Kevin Bankston provides more details and some theories throughout the thread: Contrary to the original post, this is technically happening in the larger context of Google Drive and not specific to Google Docs, although it seems likely that the issue applies to Docs as well.

But what caused this problem? According to Google's Gemini AI, the privacy settings used to feed information to Gemini should be public, but they aren't, so either the AI ​​is “hallucinating (lying)” or some of the internal systems on Google's servers are completely malfunctioning. Either way, even if this private data isn't being used to train the Gemini AI, it's not a good situation.

What's more, when Bankston finally found the settings toggle in question, he discovered that Gemini summarization for Gmail, Drive, and Docs had already been disabled — and the toggle was in an entirely different location than either of the web pages that Gemini's bot had originally pointed him to.

According to Bankston, the issue appears to be limited to Google Drive and only occurs after pressing the Gemini button on at least one document. A matching document type (PDF in this case) automatically launches Google Gemini for all files of that type opened in Google Drive thereafter. Bankston further speculates that enabling Google Workspace Labs in 2023 may have overridden the intended Gemini AI settings.

Even if this issue was limited to Google Workspace Labs users, it's a very significant drawback to helping Google test its latest and greatest technology. User consent still matters at a granular level, especially when it comes to potentially sensitive information, and Google has thoroughly disappointed at least one segment of its user base by failing to uphold that principle.

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