User alleges Gemini AI scanning Google Drive hosted PDF files without explicit permission — Google says otherwise

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Kevin Bankston, a Senior Advisor on AI Governance, discusses this concerning Google Gemini behavior.

Google Gemini Advanced
(Image credit: Google)

As part of the wider tech industry's wider push for AI, whether we want it or not, it seems that Google's Gemini AI service may now reading private Drive documents without express user permission, per a report from privacy activist and current Facebook Privacy Policy Director Kevin Bankston on X.com embedded below. 

Update (7/16, 7:33 AM): We've updated this story with Google's response.

Bankston goes on to discuss reasons why he believes that this may be glitched for users like him in particular. And, if he is correct, the apparent lack of control being given over his sensitive, private information would be concerning. Google, however, disputes these assertions.

“Our generative AI features are designed to give users choice and keep them in control of their data. Using Gemini in Google Workspace requires a user to proactively enable it, and when they do their content is used in a privacy-preserving manner to generate useful responses to their prompts, but is not otherwise stored without permission," a Google spokesperson wrote to us.

So, what exactly is going on here? Kevin Bankston has some theories, after providing much more detail in the full thread. Contrary to the initial posting, this is supposedly happening within the larger umbrella of Google Drive and not Google Docs specifically, though it seems like the issue could apply to Docs as well.

But what caused this issue? According to Google's Gemini AI, the privacy settings used to inform Gemini should be openly available, but Bankston says that they aren't.

What's more, Bankston did eventually find the settings toggle in question... only to find that Gemini summaries in Gmail, Drive, and Docs were already disabled. Additionally, it was in an entirely different place than either of the web pages to which Gemini's bot initially pointed.

For Bankston, the issue seems localized to Google Drive, and only happens after pressing the Gemini button on at least one document. According to him, the matching document type (in this case, PDF) will subsequently automatically trigger Google Gemini for all future files of the same type opened within Google Drive. He additionally theorizes that it may have been caused by him enabling Google Workspace Labs back in 2023, which could be overriding the intended Gemini AI settings.

We heard from Google after initially publishing this article and the company pointed us to a blog post about how it protects Google Workspace data. It notes that Workspace data is not ingested or used for training and that, if the feature is enabled, content from an open doc can be summarized but is not retained. The company also suggested that Bankston may have used Gemini via the side panel in Drive and that closing the panel might solve the issue.

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Christopher Harper
Christopher Harper
Contributing Writer

Christopher Harper has been a successful freelance tech writer specializing in PC hardware and gaming since 2015, and ghostwrote for various B2B clients in High School before that. Outside of work, Christopher is best known to friends and rivals as an active competitive player in various eSports (particularly fighting games and arena shooters) and a purveyor of music ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Killer Mike to the Sonic Adventure 2 soundtrack.

21 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Math Geek
    this is not really a "just started doing it" type of thing. google has ALWAYS read anything and everything you hosted with them.

    gmail, chrome, cloud storage, anything on your android phone, plus all the 3rd party data they buy and scrape as well such as health/financial records and anything else they can get their hands on.

    i personally hate it 100% but i'm sure the rest of the commenters here will just say "apple/MS/facebook/twitter/etc/etc/etc all do it, so it's ok"

    as if the fact everyone is spying on you somehow makes it ok ?!?!?
    Reply
  • ezst036
    Users who store their data with Google are fools.
    Reply
  • purposelycryptic
    Math Geek said:
    this is not really a "just started doing it" type of thing. google has ALWAYS read anything and everything you hosted with them.

    gmail, chrome, cloud storage, anything on your android phone, plus all the 3rd party data they buy and scrape as well such as health/financial records and anything else they can get their hands on.

    i personally hate it 100% but i'm sure the rest of the commenters here will just say "apple/MS/facebook/twitter/etc/etc/etc all do it, so it's ok"

    as if the fact everyone is spying on you somehow makes it ok ?!?!?
    Very few people think it's ok, but the vast majority don't really see any alternative that is truly viable for them. If you have a smart phone, you have a Google or Apple account. If you have a PC, only a small percentage of the general population are even aware that you can run Windows without a Microsoft account.

    People have just been bombarded with so many privacy violations that they've grown numb to it. If they got upset and angry every time, they would end up being upset and angry all the time.

    For better or worse, the human brain adapts to and normalizes almost any kind of long-term conditions, good or bad - you can't really avoid hedonic adaptation.

    You win the lottery, you get really, really happy for a little while, then you get used to it, and it just becomes the new normal; if your previous financial situation was stressful and impacted your happiness negatively, you will probably be less stressed and unhappy, but you'll still end up somewhere around your neutral baseline before long.

    Your privacy gets invaded and abused on a daily basis, you get seriously upset and angry. But if it keeps happening, and you see no effective way of stopping it, you won't be able to maintain that rage for any significant amount of time, and eventually, you just get used to it and accept it as normal.

    Remember when Windows 10 came out, and how ridiculously angry everyone, myself included, was about the forced telemetry and forced OS updates that you not only couldn't refuse, but that would self-install and reboot your computer? I sure as hell do, and I stayed away from Windows 10 for as long as possible, and then used various tools to disable as much of that BS as I could - I didn't start actively using Windows 10 until this year, when I inherited a PC that had it installed.

    And yet now, with it being set to go EOL next year, all anyone can talk about is how great Windows 10 is, and how they don't want to move to Windows 11 because it is so horrible. They've all forgotten about the incredible amount of BS Windows 10 forced on them, because, to them, it simply became the new normal.

    People's values are terrifyingly malleable. Expose them to anything for long enough, and they just accept it as normal, and barely actively notice the change in day to day life, whether it's incredibly beneficial to them, or incredibly harmful. Everything gets normalized. It's a key part of how we maintain a functional existence without breaking down and going insane, but it has a lot of issues, especially when other humans decide to take advantage of it.
    Reply
  • mac_angel
    Ai doing something without permission?
    If only someone could have warned us about this sooner.
    Reply
  • thisisaname
    Do they sanity check any of the documents before they train on them or is this a easy way to influence these AIs?
    Reply
  • watzupken
    mac_angel said:
    Ai doing something without permission?
    If only someone could have warned us about this sooner.
    The fact is the company and the creator does this, and so something inherent to it. You get caught, so pretend to be surprised and blame it on the AI that went rouge. Files stored in the cloud are never safe for the company that’s hosting it.
    Reply
  • Alvar "Miles" Udell
    Guess he should have used Microsoft 365 and not Google Docs.
    Reply
  • slightnitpick
    mac_angel said:
    Ai doing something without permission?
    If only someone could have warned us about this sooner.
    Oh the AI has permission all right. Just not from the end user. The coders and administrators at Alphabet gave it permission.
    Reply
  • slightnitpick
    purposelycryptic said:
    And yet now, with it being set to go EOL next year, all anyone can talk about is how great Windows 10 is, and how they don't want to move to Windows 11 because it is so horrible. They've all forgotten about the incredible amount of BS Windows 10 forced on them, because, to them, it simply became the new normal.
    I'm not going around saying that Windows 10 is great. I'm just saying that it's tolerable.
    Reply
  • OLDKnerd
    purposelycryptic said:
    You win the lottery, you get really, really happy for a little while, then you get used to it, and it just becomes the new normal
    I think i would be really really happy for the rest of my life, CUZ every day when i woke up i would NOT hear mu native tongue CUZ i would be in a country far far away, and that is reason to be happy, even if i have realized that no matter where i relocate to, that country also have a lot of " Russia ",,,,,, Russia in my new word for bat poop crazy.
    But i would be able to cope CUZ i have gone there by myself, and as a new comer i would not be very much engaged with my new country as it would take a while to really take in things, and i do not expect to live for a whole lot longer.
    Also just CUZ i moved to a new place, its not like i would get a phone and a TV again, i am way past those addictions.

    I HATE government involvement as it is rarely any good, but i would like for my country to ban ALL google services,,,, and other like them of course.
    Reply