Attention those using Gemini! Drive is accessing your documents without permission

There have been many problems with privacy and artificial intelligence in the past. Now, a user has noticed that Google’s AI assistant Gemini is analyzing and summarizing Google Drive documents even though the settings are turned off. In short, artificial intelligence is at work despite the obstacles. Here are the details…

Google Gemini is accessing your Drive files without permission

After Microsoft’s Recall scandal, Google now seems to be having a privacy problem with its artificial intelligence called Gemini. A few weeks ago, the company integrated Gemini as a new sidebar into cloud applications such as Google Docs and Google Drive. In this way, users would be able to analyze documents, summarize them and get recommendations. But things didn’t go quite as planned.

In a post on X (formerly known as Twitter), user named Kevin Bankston stated that artificial intelligence accessed personal and sensitive documents without permission. For example, when Gemini was summarizing a tax document and asked how Bankston could turn off the feature, it directed him to a non-existent settings page.

Bankston found the option by doing a manual search, but it was already disabled. So the Google Gemini AI shouldn’t have accessed the file, but it did anyway. Neowin also confirmed this problem in a test it conducted. There, Gemini analyzed and summarized all documents in Google Drive, even though it was disabled.

Google has not yet reacted to the incident. For those who do not want to use Gemini in their Google Cloud applications, the company recommends that they simply opt out of the Workspace-Labs program completely. So, it’s an “all or nothing” situation. But in any case, Google appears to be seriously violating user privacy.

We hear new news about artificial intelligence every day. This is because every IT company is now trying to integrate technology into their products. Large companies such as Microsoft, Meta and Google are integrating their own artificial intelligence models and assistants more deeply into their systems. In this process, issues regarding user privacy and data protection frequently arise.

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