Google's Gemini AI was reportedly accessing and reading private Google Drive documents without explicit user permission, despite users having disabled the relevant settings.
Privacy activist Kevin Bankston reported that Google's Gemini AI service was reading private Drive documents without express user permission. Bankston discovered that after pressing the Gemini button on at least one document in Google Drive, the AI would automatically trigger for all future files of the same type (such as PDFs) opened within Google Drive. He found that Gemini summaries in Gmail, Drive, and Docs were already disabled in his settings, yet the AI was still accessing his documents. The privacy settings that should control Gemini's access were reportedly not openly available as Google's AI claimed they should be. Bankston theorized the issue may have been caused by enabling Google Workspace Labs in 2023, which could be overriding intended Gemini AI settings. Google disputed these assertions, stating that their generative AI features require users to proactively enable them and that content is used in a privacy-preserving manner. Google suggested Bankston may have used Gemini via the side panel in Drive and that closing the panel might solve the issue. The company pointed to their blog post explaining that Workspace data is not ingested for training and content from open documents can be summarized but is not retained.
Domain classification, causal taxonomy, severity scores, and national security assessments were LLM-classified and may contain errors.
AI systems that memorize and leak sensitive personal data or infer private information about individuals without their consent. Unexpected or unauthorized sharing of data and information can compromise user expectation of privacy, assist identity theft, or cause loss of confidential intellectual property.
AI system
Due to a decision or action made by an AI system
Unintentional
Due to an unexpected outcome from pursuing a goal
Post-deployment
Occurring after the AI model has been trained and deployed