Incident 743: Gemini AI Allegedly Reads Google Drive Files Without Explicit User Consent

Description: Kevin Bankston, a privacy activist, claims that Google's Gemini AI scans private Google Drive PDFs without explicit user consent. Bankston reports that after using Gemini on one document, the AI continues to access similar files automatically. Google disputes these claims, stating that Gemini requires proactive user activation and operates within privacy-preserving settings.

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Alleged: Google developed an AI system deployed by Google and Gemini, which harmed Kevin Bankston , Google users and Google Drive users.

Incident Stats

Incident ID

743

Report Count

Incident Date

2024-07-16

Editors

Daniel Atherton

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

Google's Gemini AI caught scanning Google Drive hosted PDF files without permission — user complains feature can't be disabled

tomshardware.com

tomshardware.com · 2024

As part of the wider tech industry's wider push for AI, whether we want it or not, it seems that Google's Gemini AI service may now reading private Drive documents without express user permission, per a report from privacy activist and curr…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.