Tech Desk 
Jul 15, 2024
It has emerged via a report published by Kevin Bankston on X (formerly Twitter) that Google’s Gemini has been screening private Drive documents to train itself, without express user permission.
There’s been an uptick in AI activity in the tech industry. Tech heavyweights are using their muscles to deliver the newest innovation, though the speed with which they seek to deliver these projects may impede ethical grounds.
This report, of course, is quite concerning, user data must not be accessed without consent.
According to Google's Gemini AI, the privacy settings used to inform Gemini should be openly available, but they aren't, which means the AI is either "hallucinating (lying)" or some internal systems on Google's servers are outright malfunctioning.
read more: Google unveils Gemini Live: Seamless conversations across apps and lock screen
Either way, not a great look, even if this private data supposedly isn't used to train the Gemini AI.
Upon investigation, Bankston found that the toggle to let Gemini summarise, Gmail, Drive and Docs was already disabled, moreover, the toggle was in an entirely different place than what Gemini prompted to.
Bankston feels that the issue is local to Gemini and only occurs after pressing the Gemini button on a document The matching file type (PDF), will then automatically be paired with Gemini for all similar file types.
There's also his theory that this came about by him enabling Google Workspace Labs in the past which must’ve overrun Femini’s settings.
