Google Gemini routes personal Drive files and emails to human annotators

ninininino

Guess this is another reason to migrate to local LLMs ASAP.

rustyhancock

Really frustrating that our privacy eroded to the point anyone would think this is reasonable. But it does explain some conversations with Gemini when I wonder why it's talking about particular things. Like asking it about consultation processes for changes to parks only to get a response that's uncannily tuned to the email I got prompting the enquiry. No mention of I just read your emails etc .

EmX_3000

Is anybody surprised? Cat was let out of the bag with those mathies who chatted up AI and then AI stole their thunder.

asxndu

These things make my blood boil! Unfortunately, the alternatives are all so bad...

easytiger

I had a Google Meet Gemini transcription take well over 24hours once recently, rather than the usual <1hr. I could only assume manual intervention was the cause. It might also explain why Google do not provide a page to view transcription job queues from meet. You just have to sit and wonder

jttnr

Of course they do. Now that all the freely available training material has been consumed, every website ingested, every image classified, every YouTube video watched, and even books scanned and destroyed, the insatiable hunger for more data must be fed.

hek2sch

Any tool having manual human reviewers or annotator like all of Gemini and notebooklm (now Gemini notebook) suffer from this. Your data has high chance being read by random people or being leaked for training because they might flag it then use it to "improve" the model.

pmdr

The only thing they seem to never route to humans is support.

bri3d

Note that this is specifically Consumer Gemini with Connected Apps; Workspace Gemini (and Workspace Intelligence, the RAG thing for enterprise/Workspace) still claims not to be subject to human review: https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/generative-ai/g... So basically if you use consumer Gemini and specifically authorize the GMail app, for example, then it will sometimes use the GMail tool to load your mail from GMail, and that data (like all data in consumer Gemini) might be given to the human annotation pipeline. This whole thing seems deeply stupid to me from Google's standpoint, although they've never been good at product management - there's _way_ too much nuance to what's going on and even if they aren't technically affected, this kind of thing will almost surely make their paying enterprise customers leery.

maybewhenthesun

I used to feel very 'old man yells at sky' when I told people they were being naive using Google Drive (Or any other 'cloud storage' for that matter). I have a strong 'told you so' feeling right now.

EMM_386

It's worse than that. > Google Photos data is used to infer your interests, relationships to people in your photos, and where you've been, including by associating your face with corresponding location data and timestamps. This data is also used to do things for you, like look up your info or add items to your grocery list, and to improve Google services, including training generative AI. How does that work exactly if the images aren't even real and are generated by AI? When Google siphons up these photos to help them train their AI, the AI is now going to make associations as depicted in that photograph? That you really were with that person, in that place, in that situation, on that date? As some sort of a fact? Can someone else create that image and just put it in their library and then have that become a fact on your behalf when picked up, analyzed and trained on? Where does that all lead?

gla67890543

Any one trusting Google, Facebook with their data is wilfully blind. Their whole business model and survival based on spying on others data.

whatever1

In the name of the AI race we are taking a lot of shortcuts (privacy, quality, commercial viability etc). As anyone in software knows, the debt will eventually become due.

rbobby

Not that surprised. I dropped gemini as soon as I learned that I could not opt out of google using my chats for training.

dizhn

I use Gemini and every day it tries to connect all these apps together. It always uses reassuring language like "You are in control of your data". That wording actually makes me take a second look at what I am approving.

xlayn

So that photo that you sent on email to someone when you thought email was private... it's going to be reviewed and annotated... and trained on it... remind me what stop the thing from becoming the v.001 of the big brother surveillance tool?

fierycatnet

That's just irresponsible. If this is anything like old Google search reviews (Appen, etc.) then they will hire anyone as a contractor. I don't want my data being reviewed by some random person.

0xbadcafebee

Gemini is the worst AI agent I've used so no big loss here. Another great move to get people to move off Google services.

jan_m_savage

I don't have any data on google drives. :) Didn't want to trust them from the get go.

zx8080

Now it's the best time to establish a company: you break the law and say "It's AI, not me". And no one goes to jail.