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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

#121

Post by Suppafly »

theolivenbaum wrote: post #118
crazygringo wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except that's not what's happening, so why pretend otherwise?

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

#122

Post by JohnFen »

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…

I think that vouaobrasil was talking about scanning on the behalf of others, not scanning that you're doing on your own data. Scanning your own stuff is automatically and naturally an opt-in situation. You've consciously chosen for it to happen.

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

#123

Post by JohnFen »

drzaiusx11 wrote: post #17
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.

We also need a robots.txt extension for publicly accessable file exclusion from AI training datasets. iirc there's a nascent ai.txt but not sure if anyone follows it (yet)

robots.txt is useless as a defense mechanism (that isn't what it's trying to be). Taking the same approach for AI would likewise not be useful as a defense mechanism.

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

#124

Post by Suppafly »

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!

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

Honestly it sounds like he was toggling permissions off and on and actually has no idea why it summarized that particular document despite him requesting it summarize other documents. Google should make the settings more clear, but "I had the options off, except when I didn't, and I set some other options in a different place that I didn't think would override the others, and also I toggled a bunch of the options back and forth" is hardly the condemnation that everyone is making it out to be.

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

#125

Post by JohnFen »

mtnGoat wrote: post #102
chias wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think `robots.txt` works on the basis of the crawlers wanting to do this to be nice, or "socially responsible" or anything. So I don't hold up much hope that anything similar can happen again. Early search engines had a problem, which was that when they crawled willy nilly, people would block their IP addresses. Inventing this concept of `robots.txt` worked because search engines wanted something: to avoid IP…

Google ignores robots.txt as do many others. Try it yourself, setup a honeypot URL, don’t even link to it, just throw it in robots.txt, google bot will visit it at some point.

I discovered this years ago, and it's what made me start stop bothering with robots.txt and start blocking all the crawlers I can using .htaccess, including Google's.

That's a game of whack-a-mole that always lets a few miscreants through. I used to find that an acceptable amount of error until I learned that crawlers were gathering data to be used to train LLMs. That's a situation where even a single bot getting through is very problematic.

I still haven't found a solution to that aside from no longer allowing access to my sites without an account.

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

#126

Post by Suppafly »

Retric wrote: post #73
padolsey wrote: post #61

There is a fundamentally interesting nuance to highlight. I don't know precisely what google is doing, but if they're just shuttling the content through a closed-loop deterministic LLM, then, much like a spellchecker, I see no issue. Sure, it _feels_ creepy, but it's just an algo. Perhaps someone can articulate the precise threshold of 'access' they wish to deny apps that we overtly use? And how would that threshold…

The issue isn’t doing something to your data, it’s what happens after that point. People would be pissed if Android make everyone’s photos public, AI does this with extra steps. Train AI on X means everyone using that AI potentially has access to X with the right prompt.

Except that's not what is happening here or what the rest of us are discussing, so why even bring it up?

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

#127

Post by JohnFen »

nerdjon wrote: post #74

Shocker, Google not going quite far enough with privacy and data access? They talk about it but its never quite far enough to avoid their own services accessing data. We really need to get to the point that all data remotely stored needs to be encrypted and unable to be decrypted by the servers, only our devices. Otherwise we just allow the companies to mine the data as much as they want and we have zero insight into…

> Yes this requires the trust that they in fact cannot decrypt it.

Yes, this is where it all breaks down. In the end, it all boils down to the company saying "trust us", and it's very clear that companies simply cannot be trusted with these sorts of things.

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

#128

Post by ipaddr »

Suppafly wrote: post #121
theolivenbaum wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except that's not what's happening, so why pretend otherwise?

Because tomorrow it will with little or no discussion

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

#129

Post by shadowgovt »

dylan604 wrote: post #95
shadowgovt wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course Google reads and aggregates data inside your private docs. How would it provide search over your documents otherwise?

When I hit search, do the search right then. Don't grep out of a stored cache of prior searches.

The thing that makes it possible for search to be fast is pre-crawling and pre-indexing.

Some other engines don't do this, and the difference is remarkabe. Try a full-content search in Windows 7, you'll be staring at the dialog for two minutes while it tries to find a file that's in the same directory as you started the search in.

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

#130

Post by Suppafly »

estebarb wrote: post #47

It is urgent to educate people about how these systems work. Search requires indexing. Summarizing with a LM requires inference. Data used for inference usually is forgotten forever after used, as it is not used for training. Yeah, that should be obvious for many here, but even software engineers believe that AI are sentient things that will remember everything that they see. And that is a problem, because public is…

>And that is a problem, because public is afraid of the tech due to a wrong understanding of how it works

Honestly the general public doesn't seem to care, the people freaking out are the tech adjacent people who make money driving clicks to their own content. Regular Joes aren't upset that google shows them a summary of their documents and many of them actively appreciate it.

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