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

This concern was first raised when Gmail started, 20 years ago now; at the time people reeled at the idea of "google reads your emails to give you ads", but at the same time the 1 GB inbox and fresh UI was a compelling argument.

I think they learned from it, and google drive and co were less "scary" or less overt with scanning the stuff you have in it, also because they wanted to get that sweet corporate money.

Also, see:

"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"

- Manage your activity on Gemini : https://myactivity.google.com/product/gemini

- This page has most answers related to Google Workspace and opting out of different Google apps : https://support.google.com/docs/answer/13447104#:~:text=Turn...

It is not surprising that Gemini will summarize a document if you ask it to. "Scanning" is doing heavy lifting here; The headline implies Google is training Gemini on private documents, when the real issue is Gemini was run with a private document as input to do a summary when the user thought they had explicitly switched that off.

That having been said, it's a meaningful bug in Google's infrastructure that the setting is not being respected and the kind of thing that should make a person check their exit strategy if they are completely against using The new generation of AI in general.

They’re trying to suggest that exposing an LLM to a document in any way is equivalent to including that document in the LLM’s training set. That’s the hook in the article and the original Tweet, but the Tweet thread eventually acknowledges the differences and pivots to being angry about the existence of the AI feature at all.

There isn’t anything of substance to this story other than a Twitter user writing a rage-bait thread about being angry about an AI popup, while trying to spin it as something much more sinister.