Google’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistant Gemini is under fire for allegedly reading private documents hosted on Google Drive without users’ permission.

The report comes from user and AI Governance Senior Advisor Kevin Bankston’s thread on X, which detailed his experience with Gemini AI reading his private documents. 

“Just pulled up my tax return in @Google Docs–and unbidden, Gemini summarized it. So… Gemini is automatically ingesting even the private docs I open in Google Docs?” Bankston said. 

Bankston also reported difficulties disabling the AI assistant’s feature, saying that when following Gemini’s instructions on turning it off, the assistant initially pointed to settings he couldn’t find on his account. 

Upon further experimentation, with the help of another X user, Bankston eventually found the control in a different location but found that Gemini summaries in Gmail, Drive, and Docs were already disabled.

 “I found the setting that’s supposed to keep Gemini out of docs… and it was already turned off! Yet Gemini is absolutely giving me document summaries,” Bankston added to his thread. 

The issue seemed localized to Google Drive, with Bankston stating that the Gemini automatic summaries are ‘happening with any PDF of mine that I open from Drive’ and adding that the function will automatically trigger for all future files of the same type after pressing the Gemini button at least once in one document. 

Additionally, Bankston noted that his previous participation in Google Workspace Labs might have influenced the behavior, possibly overriding the intended Gemini AI settings.

Google’s response

In response to the concerns, especially after Tom’s Hardware’s article about the issue, Google referred to a blog post explaining how it safeguards Google Workspace data. They clarified that Workspace data isn’t used for AI training and that while Gemini can summarize open documents, it doesn’t keep any content.

Google also mentioned that Bankston might have accessed Gemini through the side panel in Drive, and closing this panel might fix the issue. They aim to reassure users about their privacy and emphasize their commitment to protecting user data.