GitHub user thisisme6598 published a report in November saying that Google has abandoned a privacy commitment on Gemini. The report scored 444 points on Hacker News.

Google introduced Workspace extensions to its Gemini assistant in 2023 and promised that human reviewers would not see personal content from Gmail, Docs and Drive, the report says. Help page 16836988 and a 2023 blog post that Google edited on 16 October now state that people may review connected emails and files, the author wrote. In guidance the author quotes, Google advises: ‘don’t connect your apps to Gemini Apps if they contain confidential information that you wouldn’t want a reviewer to see.’

Gemini searches without being asked

The report concerns the consumer version of Gemini, where the Connected Apps setting lets Gemini retrieve information from the user’s Gmail and Drive. In the author’s tests, Gemini searched in the background when the conversation mentioned an everyday topic such as a trip, a bill or a reservation. The user did not need to tag the request with @Gmail or @Drive.

Results for the same question varied because a large language model decides on tool calls, in this case searches for information, probabilistically. The author identifies four outcomes: no search, a general summary, a direct quotation of a few sentences that often contains personal data, and the full text of a message or file.

The author told Gemini about wondering whether the broadband subscription cost too much. On different occasions, Gemini pulled details such as a name, a customer account number and a payment confirmation number from an email from the internet provider into its answer. Sometimes it reproduced the entire message, headers included. Because results vary from run to run, a single test without personal data does not disprove the finding, the author said.

Tests rely on the model’s own output

The findings rest on one person’s experiments and have not been independently verified. The author recommends running the tests with the Flash model at High Thinking reasoning effort or a higher setting. The author established what the search retrieved by asking Gemini to print the text the search tool returned.

The tests show what content enters the conversation. The claim that conversations may be passed to human reviewers is based on Google’s guidance, not on any observation of review.

The author also argues that Google’s automated tools for removing personal data do not adequately recognise items such as account numbers, confirmation numbers and combinations of names, places and events. The author cites Google’s own documentation.

PithWire, daily.dev and aigovernance.com are among the outlets that have covered the report. They rely on the GitHub report and do not say they carried out tests of their own. The site aigovernance.com extends the issue to companies’ Workspace data, although the report deals with the consumer version. Organisations subject to GDPR may need to reassess the legal basis for processing the data, the site says. Google has not commented publicly on the change, PithWire reported.