Show HN: Google Gemini Is Scanning Your Photos – and the EU Said No
Google has expanded its Personal Intelligence feature so that Gemini can now access your Google Photos face data, Gmail, YouTube history, and search activity to generate personalized AI images — live for US paid subscribers as of April 2026. https://vucense.com/privacy-sovereignty/surveillance-biometr...
Discussion Highlights (11 comments)
nryoo
The EU angle is interesting but the more immediate concern is the opt-in/opt-out framing. Google historically defaults these features to on and buries the toggle — did they actually make face data access opt-in from the start, or is this another "we'll notify you and assume consent" situation? The GDPR enforcement gap between announcement and actual compliance has been wide enough to drive a truck through.
j45
I wonder if it will be claimed one day that the AI got snoopy and didn't listen.
amazingamazing
barring fully local AI, not sure how it can work without using your data, by design. it's personalized or not.
0xbadcafebee
Unless something changed I'm not aware of, you have to opt-in to Personal Intelligence for private data. It asked me about 10 times to turn it on, I said no each time, it's still not enabled.
balamatom
Someone just handed me a smartphone today; the second thing I saw it say was something to the effect of "Gemini can look at your screen now (CoPilot outrage style)" and then I politely noped the fuck out of the building. I expect that info to be completely sufficient to dox me; in the meantime, while waiting for the boys to arrive -- does anyone know how to make the camera in Waydroid not crash the entire stack? Or am I to understand that as yet another bloody rite of passage?
gnabgib
This is a blog post, not a Show HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
jimmydoe
idk why but Gemini can't even read gmail attachments
Trasmatta
Moved all my photos over to Ente recently, and I'm very happy to no longer be feeding all of that data into the Google machine. I'd highly recommend everyone else move their photos out as well (Immich is another good option).
johndhi
Do they train Gemini other people use based on this or just generate images for me?
AlexCoventry
According to the article, you can fix this by turning off Gemini Apps Activity in https://myactivity.google.com/product/gemini I already have this turned off. It's slow, but I use a browser extension to save my Gemini chats locally, when I want to keep them.
sixothree
I uploaded an image to google maps once on my iPhone. A few weeks later I get a notification - "How was City Park? Care to share a photo with Google Maps?". I noped out pretty quick. I'm 99% sure it asked for permission to upload a photo and did not explicitly describe how it would be scanning all of my photos in the background. Creepy and gross.