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Google hits back over Gemini accusations, claiming that its AI assistant isn’t prying into your files

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4 months ago

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Google hits back over Gemini accusations, claiming that its AI assistant isn’t prying into your files

Key Takeaways

  • Google refutes Gemini accusations, clarifying that Kevin’s claims featured “several inaccuracies”.
  • The company emphasized its data privacy, stating Gemini does not store user data from summaries.
  • AI concerns persist, but for now, Google assures users Gemini respects privacy boundaries.



UPDATE: 2024/07/15 19:58 EST BY SIMON BATT


Google hits back over Gemini accusations, claiming that its AI assistant isn’t prying into your files

It seems that this story may actually be chalked up to user error this time. Google has gotten in touch with us to clear up the mess, stating that Kevin’s thread had “several inaccuracies.” As such, the company wanted to take the time to clear up what was actually going on when Kevin encountered Gemini analyzing his tax return.

Google clears the air about Gemini, claiming that Kevin’s claim is based on “several inaccuracies”

In the correspondence, Google takes the time to break down where Kevin went wrong. First, the company points to its blog post on
Google Workspace
about how Gemini works. It points to this specific part of the article:

Your data stays in Workspace.
We do not use your Workspace data to train or improve the underlying generative AI and large language models that power Bard, Search, and other systems outside of Workspace without permission.

On top of this, Google states that Gemini isn’t actually ingesting the data it took on in Kevin’s case. It was adamant that “neither [the Gemini] summary nor the doc itself is stored”. As such, Google asserts that users should not be concerned about AI models using their Google Docs data, as any information used to generate a summary is discarded after use.

Google also cleared up that Gemini remembers the user’s preferences, and does not automatically turn itself back on. It surmised that Kevin used Gemini’s side panel in Google Drive for PDFs and left it in that state when opening his tax return. The correspondent stated that all that Kevin had to do was close the side panel and Gemini would stop giving summaries.

In this budding era of AI, people are understandably concerned about where their personal data goes. Fortunately, it seems Kevin has nothing to worry about this time.

The original story now follows.

When AI assistants appear in productivity suites, people understandably get concerned over what they can and can’t read. If you’re working on a sensitive and private document, you likely don’t want an AI assistant scanning it and beaming all of your data to an external server. Unfortunately, that may have been what happened to one user, who noticed that Google Gemini automatically gave its opinion on a document he had just opened, despite him having never asked it to do so.


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Google Gemini may be peeking into files without permission

Creating an AI wallpaper using Gemini Advanced on Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE (2024)

As spotted by Tom’s Hardware, this saga begins with a post by Kevin Bankston on X. He states that, after opening a tax return as a PDF file in Google Docs, Gemini suddenly popped up and gave him a summary of his taxes. Kevin claims he never invoked Gemini after opening the PDF file, and he didn’t feed it any information himself.


He did a little more digging and noticed that it only affected PDFs. He surmised that one time, he opened a PDF and clicked on the Gemini button to see what it did. This “told” Gemini that it was okay to appear every time he opened a PDF.

He goes on to explain that he asked Google Gemini how to disable the feature, and it gave him hallucinated instructions on settings that didn’t exist. Kevin then finds the actual location of the setting to disable Gemini in Google Docs – only to find that it was already disabled.


The replies to Kevin had a mix of angles. Some people lamented that Google’s productivity services may now be a hub for its AI training. Others questioned why Kevin was uploading tax returns to Google Docs in the first place. And one commenter asked if the unsolicited help from Gemini was even useful, which Kevin denied.

As usual, when someone goes onto social media with claims like this, it’s always good to take it with a grain of salt. We can’t tell what Kevin did or how his PC was set up, so it may have been human error on his part. However, there is still a chance that Google Gemini may be peeking into our files more than we’d like.


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