Google Gemini quietly sends your personal Drive files and emails to human reviewers
Google Gemini routes personal Drive files and emails to human annotators
Google once promised that personal content from Gmail, Docs, and Drive connected to Gemini "is not seen by human reviewers." That promise is gone: an updated help page and a revised 2023 blog post now warn that reviewers may see "just the email or file." Testing shows ambient mentions of trips or bills can autonomously trigger Workspace lookups, and because tool-calling is probabilistic, full unredacted files sometimes land in session context and human review.
Don't connect your apps to Gemini Apps if they contain confidential information that you wouldn't want a reviewer to see.
- bri3d
Note that this is specifically Consumer Gemini with Connected Apps; Workspace Gemini (and Workspace Intelligence, the RAG thing for enterprise/Workspace) still claims not to be subject to human review:
https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/generative-ai/g...
So basically if you use consumer Gemini and specifically authorize the GMail app, for example, then it will sometimes use the GMail tool to load your mail from GMail, and that data (like all data in consumer Gemini) might be given to the human annotation pipeline.
This whole thing seems deeply stupid to me from Google's standpoint, although they've never been good at product management - there's _way_ too much nuance to what's going on and even if they aren't technically affected, this kind of thing will almost surely make their paying enterprise customers leery.
- rustyhancock
Really frustrating that our privacy eroded to the point anyone would think this is reasonable.
But it does explain some conversations with Gemini when I wonder why it's talking about particular things. Like asking it about consultation processes for changes to parks only to get a response that's uncannily tuned to the email I got prompting the enquiry.
No mention of I just read your emails etc .
- EMM_386
It's worse than that.
> Google Photos data is used to infer your interests, relationships to people in your photos, and where you've been, including by associating your face with corresponding location data and timestamps. This data is also used to do things for you, like look up your info or add items to your grocery list, and to improve Google services, including training generative AI.
How does that work exactly if the images aren't even real and are generated by AI? When Google siphons up these photos to help them train their AI, the AI is now going to make associations as depicted in that photograph?
That you really were with that person, in that place, in that situation, on that date? As some sort of a fact?
Can someone else create that image and just put it in their library and then have that become a fact on your behalf when picked up, analyzed and trained on?
Where does that all lead?
- hek2sch
Any tool having manual human reviewers or annotator like all of Gemini and notebooklm (now Gemini notebook) suffer from this. Your data has high chance being read by random people or being leaked for training because they might flag it then use it to "improve" the model.
- whatever1
In the name of the AI race we are taking a lot of shortcuts (privacy, quality, commercial viability etc). As anyone in software knows, the debt will eventually become due.
- jan_m_savage
I don't have any data on google drives. :) Didn't want to trust them from the get go.
- fierycatnet
That's just irresponsible. If this is anything like old Google search reviews (Appen, etc.) then they will hire anyone as a contractor. I don't want my data being reviewed by some random person.
- statsins
Privacy is irrelevant going forward