Google hits back at Gemini allegations, claiming its AI worker isn’t interested in your information

When AI assistants appear in productivity suites, people naturally become concerned about what they’re capable of learning and what they won’t learn. If you’re working on a sensitive and private file, you probably don’t need an AI worker to scan it and send your entire data to an external server. Sadly, that’s what happened to a man who noticed that Google Gemini automatically gave his opinion on a file he recently opened, even though he never requested it to do so.

Google Gemini may be tracking data without permission

As seen through Tom’s {hardware}, this saga begins with a post by Kevin Bankston on X. He says that, after opening a tax return as a PDF document in Google Docs, Gemini unexpectedly appeared and gave him a summary of his taxes. Kevin claims that he never invoked Gemini after opening the PDF document, and that he did not enter any information into it himself.

He did an extra minute of digging and saw that it had the biggest impact on the PDF. He guessed it was a present, opened a PDF and clicked the Gemini button to see what it was doing. This “told” Gemini that it felt good to see each appearance whenever he opened a PDF.

The explanation he’s going to give is that he requested Google Gemini to disable descriptions, and it gave him misleading directions on settings that didn’t exist. Kevin Nearest revealed the untouched location of the environment for disabling Gemini in Google Docs – best to find out it was already disabled.

Kevin’s answers were a mix of different angles. Some lamented that Google’s productivity products and services may now be the focus of its AI coaching. Others wondered why Kevin imported tax returns to Google Docs in the first place on the playground. And one commenter asked if Gemini’s unsolicited help was even useful, which Kevin denied.

As always, when someone is taking to social media with claims like this, it is always right to criticize them with a pinch of salt. We can’t tell what Kevin did or how his PC was set up, so it must be human error on his part. On the other hand, there is still the possibility that Google Gemini may be tracking more of our data than we expect.