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Google's Gemini AI caught scanning Google Drive PDF files without permission

tomshardware.com

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Re: Google's Gemini AI caught scanning Google Drive PDF files without permission

#111

Post by phendrenad2 »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #15

All AI should be opt-in, which includes both training and scanning. You should have to check a box that says "I would like to use AI features", and the accompanying text should be crystal clear what that means. This should be mandatory, enforced, and come with strict fines for companies that do not comply.

By "scanning" what do you mean exactly? I assume you mean for non-training purposes, in other words simply ephemerally reading docs and providing summaries. Why should that be regulated exactly?

Re: Google's Gemini AI caught scanning Google Drive PDF files without permission

#112

Post by phendrenad2 »

mtnGoat wrote: post #100
thenoblesunfish wrote: post #97

The title is misleading, isn't it? I was expecting this was scanning for training or testing or something, but this is summarization of articles the user is looking at, so "caught" is disingenous. You don't "catch" people doing things they tell you they are doing, while they're doing it.

He had the permissions turned off, so regardless of what it did with the document, it did it without permission! The title is correct!

[flagged]

Re: Google's Gemini AI caught scanning Google Drive PDF files without permission

#114

Post by DebtDeflation »

rurp wrote: post #109
DebtDeflation wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is becoming the new Social Media in that users are NOT the customer they are the product. Instead of generating data for a Social Media company to use to sell ads to companies you are generating data to train their AI, in exchange you get to use their service for free.

The deal keeps getting worse too. In addition to hoovering up your data for whatever products they want, Google has gotten more aggressive about pushing paid services on top of it. The amount of up-sell nags and ads have increased significantly in the past couple years. For a company like Google that kind of monetization creep only gets worse over time.

Not surprising at all. Inferencing against foundation models is very expensive, training them is insanely expensive. Orders of magnitude more so than whatever was needed to run the AdWords business. I guess I should modify my original post to "in exchange you get to use our service at a somewhat subsidized price".

Re: Google's Gemini AI caught scanning Google Drive PDF files without permission

#115

Post by hiatus »

silvaring wrote: post #78

I just want to add that gmail has a very sneaky 'add to drive' button that is way too easy to click when working with email attachments. How long til gmail attachments get uploaded into drive by default through some obscure update that toggles everything to 'yes'?

> How long til gmail attachments get uploaded into drive by default through some obscure update that toggles everything to 'yes'?

This already is the case for attachments that exceed 25 megabytes.

Re: Google's Gemini AI caught scanning Google Drive PDF files without permission

#116

Post by denton-scratch »

grugagag wrote: post #50
bitnasty wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because “the cloud” is someone else’s computer doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

I think that wasn’t supposed to be taken literally but more tongue in cheek. The main point being that it belongs to some other party. But the cloud buzzword is fuzzy in description. Ever since ‘cloud’ privacy took a nosedive

Back in the 80s, we used to draw network diagrams on the whiteboard; those parts of the network that belonged neither to us nor to our users was represented by an outline of a cloud. This cloud didn't provide storage or (useable) computing resource. If you pushed stuff in here, it came out there.

I think it was a reasonable analogy. You can't see inside it; you don't know how it works, and you don't need to. Note that at this time, 'the internet' wasn't the only way of joining heterogenous networks; there was also the OSI stack.

So I was annoyed when some bunch of kids who had never seen such whiteboard diagrams decided to re-purpose the term to refer to whatever piece of the internet they had decided to appropriate, fence-in and then rent out.

Re: Google's Gemini AI caught scanning Google Drive PDF files without permission

#117

Post by crazygringo »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #15

All AI should be opt-in, which includes both training and scanning. You should have to check a box that says "I would like to use AI features", and the accompanying text should be crystal clear what that means. This should be mandatory, enforced, and come with strict fines for companies that do not comply.

Training I can understand, but why scanning?

It's literally just running an algorithm over your data and spitting out the results for you. Fundamentally it's no different from spellcheck, or automatically creating a table of contents from header styles.

As long as the results stay private to you (which in this case, they are), I don't see what the concern is. The fact that the algorithm is LLM-based has zero relevance regarding privacy or security.

Re: Google's Gemini AI caught scanning Google Drive PDF files without permission

#118

Post by theolivenbaum »

crazygringo wrote: post #117
vouaobrasil wrote: post #15

All AI should be opt-in, which includes both training and scanning. You should have to check a box that says "I would like to use AI features", and the accompanying text should be crystal clear what that means. This should be mandatory, enforced, and come with strict fines for companies that do not comply.

Training I can understand, but why scanning? It's literally just running an algorithm over your data and spitting out the results for you. Fundamentally it's no different from spellcheck, or automatically creating a table of contents from header styles. As long as the results stay private to you (which in this case, they are), I don't see what the concern is. The fact that the algorithm is LLM-based has zero relevanc…

Except that there's still a grey area on who owns the copyright of the generated text, and they might be able to use the output without you knowing.

Re: Google's Gemini AI caught scanning Google Drive PDF files without permission

#119

Post by switch007 »

neilv wrote: post #86
switch007 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GrapheneOS helps here by having no real backup solution at all. Google account is entirely optional Pixels have first class support You can also disable Network access to any app (It's a buggy ride though and requires reading a lot of docs and forum posts)

How is it buggy? Are you using the Google Play Store? I've been using GrapheneOS for years (Pixel 3 through 7), with only open source add-on apps and no Google Play Store, and it's been pretty solid. (Other than my carrier seeming to hate the 6a hardware or model specifically.)

Are you suggesting GrapheneOS is bug-free? ... https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues

It was referring to the overall experience to which I was referring, not the OS specifically ("it's a buggy ride", it = the ride, not GrapheneOS)

I imagine a lot of the issues are because of the apps not testing on GrapheneOS.

But I've had lots of little issues:

- Nova Launcher on a daily basis stopped working when pressing the right button (the 'overview' button). I had to kill the stock Launcher app to fix it, interestingly. Had to revert to the stock launcher

- 1Password frequently doesn't trigger auto-fill in Vivaldi

- Occasionally on boot the SIM unlock doesn't trigger

- Camera crashing often (yes, "could be hardware"...I read the forums/GitHub issues)

More that I can't remember. It's a bit frustrating.

But don't get me wrong, I appreciate the project. I'm not going to go back to stock

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