October 16 edit to Google's own blog post confirms consumer Gemini sends connected Drive files and Gmail to human reviewers
- Google's 2023 Workspace extension post promised personal Gmail, Docs and Drive content is not seen by human reviewers; the October 16 edit to that post and Help Answer 16836988 now warn that reviewers may see just the email or file.
- Consumer Gemini with Connected Apps pulls Drive and Gmail content into the review pipeline on ambient mentions of trips, bills or reservations, with no @Drive or @Gmail tag needed.
- Retrieval is probabilistic: a run returns zero retrieval, a generic summary, a 2 to 4 sentence unredacted quote with PII, or the full unredacted file, so one clean test does not disprove the pipeline.
- Commenters note the exposure is consumer Gemini only: Workspace Gemini and Workspace Intelligence still claim no human review, which one reader calls a confusing product move that will spook enterprise customers.
- The reproduction steps tell testers to delete the conversation between attempts so Gemini cannot answer from chat history instead of the retrieval tool.
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Guess this is another reason to move to local LLMs ASAP. Though this isn't a local model problem at all, Google is shipping your Drive files to humans.
What gets me is how fast we decided this was normal. I asked Gemini about park consultation processes once and got an answer tuned exactly to an email I'd just received, with zero mention that it had read my inbox.
Honestly I am surprised. Drive and Gmail had decades of trust behind them and Google isn't OpenAI, so this is a real break, not business as usual.
Blood boiling, but the alternatives are all bad. Self hosting isn't that bad though, you get decent results for a fraction of the cost if you're willing to do a bit of work.
Proton has mail, drive and a web LLM chat and they work fine for me. An old laptop running Immich covers the photos.
Worth being precise: this is consumer Gemini with Connected Apps only. Workspace Gemini and Workspace Intelligence still claim no human review and there are retention contracts. Still a stupid product move, because it makes paying enterprise customers leery even when they aren't affected.
Every time I open Gemini it throws a full screen allow connected apps popup and I click no. It never says whether that means my entire drive or per-file permission, so no.
I had a Meet Gemini transcription take over 24 hours once instead of the usual hour. Hard not to assume a human got involved, and there's no page to check the job queue.
Any tool with human annotators has this problem, NotebookLM included. Your data gets read by random people, or flagged and fed back into training to improve the model.
If this is anything like the old search review vendors they'll hire anyone as a contractor. I don't want my mail read by some random person.
Sounds like a serious class action to me.
In the AI race we're taking shortcuts on privacy and quality, and the debt comes due eventually. It's a religion now, innovation is beyond question.