Google Gemini routes personal Drive files and emails to human annotators

Posted by gf74918 5 hours ago

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Comments

Comment by bri3d 2 hours ago

Note that this is specifically Consumer Gemini with Connected Apps; Workspace Gemini (and Workspace Intelligence, the RAG thing for enterprise/Workspace) still claims not to be subject to human review:

https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/generative-ai/g...

So basically if you use consumer Gemini and specifically authorize the GMail app, for example, then it will sometimes use the GMail tool to load your mail from GMail, and that data (like all data in consumer Gemini) might be given to the human annotation pipeline.

This whole thing seems deeply stupid to me from Google's standpoint, although they've never been good at product management - there's _way_ too much nuance to what's going on and even if they aren't technically affected, this kind of thing will almost surely make their paying enterprise customers leery.

Comment by snailmailman 1 hour ago

Any time I’ve opened Gemini it’s given me a full screen “do you want to allow connected apps” popup and I click no every single time.

It’s not clear what clicking yes does. Is it my entire drive and Gmail? Do I have to give permission per-file/folder/email?

So I click no. And it just gives me the popup again later

Comment by donmcronald 1 hour ago

> No > Ask me every 5 minutes

It should be illegal and the tech companies using these patterns should incur massive fines. Do it retroactively. Screw the assholes that think it’s acceptable.

Comment by timnetworks 39 minutes ago

Instead, the people publishing these types of routines should be named publicly, so that those dealing with them on a daily basis can spit in their mouth.

Comment by redanddead 19 minutes ago

bet you gemini would tell us who the product manager and svp responsible are

Comment by mapontosevenths 1 minute ago

I asked it what leader was likely responsible for the decision and it told me.

I won't share that information, because I'm a decent human being and an adult. That said... yikes.

Comment by themodestman 48 minutes ago

Just use uBlock Origin and select the popup with the element picker to remove it forever

Comment by BOOSTERHIDROGEN 29 minutes ago

Even worse because Gemini app also show this popup.

Comment by taneq 10 minutes ago

Then don’t use the Gemini app. Refuse to engage with the bullshit.

Comment by apt-apt-apt-apt 53 minutes ago

Wasn't a free market and competition supposed to take care of these problems?

It seems like as things get more advanced, you don't really have alternatives, and companies can get away with things knowing you don't have much choice.

Comment by mjburgess 49 minutes ago

google is a monopoly

Comment by giancarlostoro 13 minutes ago

> It’s not clear

It's really embarrassing that Google does these things, its even more embarassing that their UI / UX is just really awful and all over the place. I've never been in the shoes of having to push a dark pattern into production, but I can't help but feel I'd start looking to work literally anywhere else.

Comment by scuttlebutt98 5 minutes ago

You have to remember that Google is first and foremost a data company. I don't want to sound conspiratorial but every misclick or misunderstood permission window does give Google more data which means more money.

Comment by gf74918 1 hour ago

It allows Gemini to autonomously search anything in your Drive or email. If it deems it relevant to the conversation, Gemini can pull summaries, snippets, or even the file plaintext of the file into the context window, making it eligible for human review.

Comment by mentalgear 1 hour ago

Corporate Harassment

Comment by giancarlostoro 14 minutes ago

This all to me sounds like a serious class-action lawsuit.

Comment by gf74918 2 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by Terr_ 1 hour ago

4-hour account with just LLM copy-paste comments is not a good look. (Yes, I know it's the submitter-account.)

Comment by Andrex 1 hour ago

Maybe it's supposed to be ironic?

Comment by usefulcat 1 hour ago

"Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans."

Comment by Animats 1 hour ago

Somebody should start an "exceeds authorized access" computer fraud and abuse case prosecution over this. Perhaps the new Texas state attorney general.

Comment by EMM_386 2 hours ago

It's worse than that.

> Google Photos data is used to infer your interests, relationships to people in your photos, and where you've been, including by associating your face with corresponding location data and timestamps. This data is also used to do things for you, like look up your info or add items to your grocery list, and to improve Google services, including training generative AI.

How does that work exactly if the images aren't even real and are generated by AI? When Google siphons up these photos to help them train their AI, the AI is now going to make associations as depicted in that photograph?

That you really were with that person, in that place, in that situation, on that date? As some sort of a fact?

Can someone else create that image and just put it in their library and then have that become a fact on your behalf when picked up, analyzed and trained on?

Where does that all lead?

Comment by scuttlebutt98 4 minutes ago

Most modern AI models carry watermarks embedded in images and text, so they can know if something is AI or not. These are probably detected and discarded from the training set.

Comment by reorder9695 1 hour ago

I have never been more glad to have moved to a self hosted immich server on an old laptop.

Comment by Gigachad 5 minutes ago

As soon as AI started blowing up I rushed all of my data out of Google and to self hosted. It's obvious they were going to suck it all up in to their training and analyze everything to build a perfect profile on you. They always were but the capabilities are supercharged now.

Immich + Nextcloud + Dawarich behind Tailscale has been a dream. I picked up a second hand HP mini PC for cheap, 3D printed a mini server rack to mount it in with some hard drives.

Comment by topaztee 27 minutes ago

i need to do this. bit scared my old laptop will die suddently and all my photos will be lost

Comment by taneq 6 minutes ago

That feeling is your cue to do something about it. Don’t let best be the enemy of good. Automatic backups are great, but if you have irreplaceable data that it would pain you to lose, go get an external hard drive and dump it all on that, right now.

Comment by kevg123 17 minutes ago

Attach a USB hard drive and create a nightly rsync job

Comment by agumonkey 22 minutes ago

never tried 1-2-3 rule of backups ?

(me neither, but i should)

Comment by topaztee 17 minutes ago

me neither, but i should

Comment by heikkilevanto 1 hour ago

I have tried to degoogle my life. I already have a way to get my photos to my own server. But how can I take photos on my phone without google getting their fingers into them?

Comment by taneq 2 minutes ago

I switched to iOS as the lesser of two evils. Sure, for all their supposed privacy focus Apple does some sketchy stuff too, but at least my personal data is a little bit siloed this way.

I did run CyanogenMod / LineageOS for several years but the reliability I needed just wasn’t there. This may have improved since then, though.

Comment by xlayn 1 hour ago

Leads to people start calling their senator and start pushing to regulate and break apart every big tech... just as they torrent everything (whoops), they will access everything...

Comment by rustyhancock 3 hours ago

Really frustrating that our privacy eroded to the point anyone would think this is reasonable.

But it does explain some conversations with Gemini when I wonder why it's talking about particular things. Like asking it about consultation processes for changes to parks only to get a response that's uncannily tuned to the email I got prompting the enquiry.

No mention of I just read your emails etc .

Comment by bemtevi 16 minutes ago

I mean, trusting Google from the beginning was always a losing game.

Comment by brador 3 hours ago

Everything’s a pre-structured duopoly for national security and profit moating.

There’s nowhere to go.

Comment by kevg123 16 minutes ago

Build a Beautiful Bubble and self host as much as you can

Comment by qeternity 2 hours ago

There are 5 major frontier labs competing in the US alone with serious capital. Perhaps only 2 of them are are truly in contention for the top spot, but it's highly competitive. Then throw in the handful of very serious sub-frontier open weights labs, who are creating huge price competition for the frontier labs, and I have no idea how you can come to this conclusion.

Cloud is no different: 3 major cloud vendors, with 1 clear leader...and now a long tail of tier 2s and neoclouds that are also investing incredible sums to compete.

Where is the pre-structured duopoly? Where is the profit moating?

Comment by ftchd 23 minutes ago

Ignorance is bliss

Comment by whoanoway 16 minutes ago

[dead]

Comment by brador 1 hour ago

There are 2 US frontier AI labs. The others aren’t competing at the frontier hence no concern for national security or moating. The moat is 1 main, 1 backup/pusher.

You can’t build a fighter jet in your garage.

Comment by mistrial9 3 hours ago

"search is deeply connected to AI"

in case the reply is not clear, I mean to emphasize and amplify the alarming Google behavior described above

Comment by gf74918 1 hour ago

[flagged]

Comment by hek2sch 3 hours ago

Any tool having manual human reviewers or annotator like all of Gemini and notebooklm (now Gemini notebook) suffer from this. Your data has high chance being read by random people or being leaked for training because they might flag it then use it to "improve" the model.

Comment by gf74918 2 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by whatever1 1 hour ago

In the name of the AI race we are taking a lot of shortcuts (privacy, quality, commercial viability etc). As anyone in software knows, the debt will eventually become due.

Comment by bemtevi 30 minutes ago

It is not just a race anymore but a religion. Innovation has become sacred and beyond question.

Comment by Gigachad 3 minutes ago

Security and care is "Bullshit and loser thinking" as per the Proton CEO.

Comment by fierycatnet 45 minutes ago

That's just irresponsible. If this is anything like old Google search reviews (Appen, etc.) then they will hire anyone as a contractor. I don't want my data being reviewed by some random person.

Comment by rbobby 1 hour ago

Not that surprised. I dropped gemini as soon as I learned that I could not opt out of google using my chats for training.

Comment by gla67890543 1 hour ago

Any one trusting Google, Facebook with their data is wilfully blind. Their whole business model and survival based on spying on others data.

Comment by asxndu 3 hours ago

These things make my blood boil!

Unfortunately, the alternatives are all so bad...

Comment by xnickb 3 hours ago

Self hosting is not all that bad. If you are willing to do a bit of work you can actually get decent results at a fraction of the cost.

Comment by sdoering 2 hours ago

I am in the process of moving my stuff from Google to selfhosted alternatives. Google Photos => Immich, Google Drive => probably Next Cloud or some better alternative.

I am also looking into how to selfhost my email (and yes I know, the horror of inboxing from self hosting. But I am at the point of not only willing to give it a tr, but actively saying "fuck you" to everybody that does not receive my email, because they are on Outlook or O365 (or Google, bt inboxing into Google is easier imho).

Especially with my paid Google now daily having spam in my inbox, while valid emails are so often in spam, that I have to check spam at least once per week.

Comment by eks391 2 hours ago

As someone who self hosts many services, I would encourage you to switch to self hosted email last. Even though self hosting has been made much easier thanks to really incredible FOSS tools, you are going to have random learning pains, some delayed by a few months, and it would really suck to lose email for even the shortest durations. The others are easy to live without while you debug during the learning process.

Btw immich is incredible. I recommend Nextcloud AIO instead of raw Nextcloud. Absolutely great tools

Comment by munk-a 1 hour ago

I think the low cost reasonable option right now is to self-host a receiving address and then pick the email provider that looks the least trash and forward your stuff to them to actually handle sending/browsing. It gives you the option to go full self-hosted in the future if your mind changes with minimal headaches but costs practically no effort for the short term.

Comment by kevg123 49 minutes ago

This is what I do. OpenSMTPD to receive mail, Dovecot to handle IMAP and spamassassin for full spam rules control.

I still configure my clients (Thunderbird, K-9, etc.) to send to my mail server, but that just forwards on to the actual email sender (if authenticated). This way I can change email senders without needing to change all my clients. There are still risks though because if you choose the cheaper plan (as I do), then you get grouped onto a sending pool that spammers might use and then you might get periodically affected if that set of IPs take a reputation hit.

My config for sending: With OpenSMTPD, process it with DKIM:

    action "process_dkim" relay host smtp://127.0.0.1:10027
    match from auth for any action "process_dkim"
A local DKIM process then processes and sends back to OpenSMTPD:

    listen    127.0.0.1:10027
    relay     127.0.0.1:10028
    [...] DKIM signing config [...]
Then back to OpenSMTPD to forward to the final email sender:

    listen on lo   port 10028 tag DKIM
    action "process_outbound" relay host smtp+tls://label@... auth <secrets>
    match tag DKIM for any action "process_outbound"
I'm not sure if I even need to sign with DKIM as my email sender does the final DKIM signing, but it seems that in the email world, it's always best to do things as "properly" as possible whenever you can.

I've been doing this for years, and spam and deliverability issues have been minimal and I've dealt with some big names.

Comment by qwerpy 1 hour ago

I’m looking to set up immich on my server. How do you back up your media? If you get hit by a bus how do you leave instructions and mechanisms to your family to restore the backup? My wife won’t move off of iCloud until I have a great answer for those.

Comment by Gigachad 1 minute ago

I use Restic + Rclone to create an encrypted snapshot to Google Drive. It's easier if you pick an S3 compatible storage though.

That way Google has no ability to read the data and it's only a just in case backup if my NAS goes up in flames.

Comment by kevg123 19 minutes ago

One idea is to attach a USB hard drive and set a nightly job to rsync the Immich folders there. Worst case, if no one's willing to rebuild Immich, they just detach the hard drive, attach to any computer, and copy/paste the whole folder onto iCloud or GDrive. Probably best to format the USB hard drive as FAT32 so that any computer can read it.

Comment by chneu 2 hours ago

Don't self host email. Checkout purelymail or a similar alternative

Self hosting email is a nightmare and can bite you in the ass big time.

Comment by kevg123 14 minutes ago

As another commenter noted, it's really not so bad, just probably don't self-host _sending_ email: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50433228

Self-hosting receiving emails isn't too bad. And you can still control sending too as a relay to the actual sender.

Comment by mickael-kerjean 1 hour ago

I've spent the last decade building a Dropbox alternative that works on top of any storage protocol (SFTP, S3, SMB, IFS, GIT WebDAV, local disk, and literally everything else [1]) and its on github [2]

[1] https://www.filestash.app/docs/plugin/#storage

[2] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash

Comment by nunez 31 minutes ago

There are still no feasible alternatives to Google Drive that make sharing content with others with minimal hoops easy.

Comment by kevg123 15 minutes ago

NextCloud isn't too bad

Comment by nicce 3 hours ago

These days it is really a breeze. Email, Drive clone and everything. Just need to invest bit a for hardware.

Comment by matchstickman23 2 hours ago

If only hardware wasn't crazy expensive :/

Comment by munk-a 1 hour ago

But it isn't - not for doing stuff like self-hosting files? It's actually incredibly cheap, most people probably have a commodity PC lying around and can shove a few cheap HDDs into it and RAID stripe it if they're ambitious... or just full mirror their files if they aren't. And if you're really scared of loss find some host provider and rent a cheapo instance somewhere geographically far from you to park a mirror of the data.

Comment by easytiger 3 hours ago

I had a Google Meet Gemini transcription take well over 24hours once recently, rather than the usual <1hr. I could only assume manual intervention was the cause.

It might also explain why Google do not provide a page to view transcription job queues from meet. You just have to sit and wonder

Comment by bri3d 2 hours ago

There are explicit data retention contracts for Workspace (including Gemini transcription) and Google claim this data is never used for training or human review, so this is fairly baseless.

This gist is specifically about the consumer version of Gemini used in Gemini Apps. Basically if you connect your consumer Gemini (which always sends stuff to the training pipeline) to your personal Google Apps account, it gets tools that it can invoke to read your Google Apps data, which then might appear back in your consumer Gemini transcripts that are getting sent to the training pipeline.

Doing this is a stupid product move from Google (per the usual) because it confuses their enterprise customers into thinking Really Bad Stuff like this is happening.

Comment by pmdr 2 hours ago

The only thing they seem to never route to humans is support.

Comment by sans_souse 1 hour ago

So true!

Comment by xlayn 1 hour ago

So that photo that you sent on email to someone when you thought email was private... it's going to be reviewed and annotated... and trained on it... remind me what stop the thing from becoming the v.001 of the big brother surveillance tool?

Comment by jttnr 3 hours ago

Of course they do. Now that all the freely available training material has been consumed, every website ingested, every image classified, every YouTube video watched, and even books scanned and destroyed, the insatiable hunger for more data must be fed.

Comment by EmX_3000 3 hours ago

Is anybody surprised? Cat was let out of the bag with those mathies who chatted up AI and then AI stole their thunder.

Comment by reasonableklout 3 hours ago

Yes, this is very surprising to me considering Drive and email are products that have had rock solid trust for decades, and Google is not OpenAI!

Comment by realsarm 3 hours ago

"Rock Solid" Google was known to be privacy invasive. Idk how people trust Google for privacy when it comes to Ai. Look at this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40965892

Comment by opengrass 3 hours ago

If you haven't figured out self hosting then you have what's coming to you.

Comment by alterom 1 hour ago

Great way to say that 99% of people deserve to get fucked by duopolies and lack of consumer protections.

Clearly the person who bakes my bread should've known better and learned Linux a decade ago to be prepared for this. Sucks to be them I guess.

Comment by Paracompact 1 hour ago

If you aren't baking your own bread from your own home-grown wheat processed in your own backyard tower mill, then you deserve the ergot poisoning.

Comment by 53 minutes ago

Comment by maybewhenthesun 2 hours ago

I used to feel very 'old man yells at sky' when I told people they were being naive using Google Drive (Or any other 'cloud storage' for that matter).

I have a strong 'told you so' feeling right now.

Comment by ninininino 4 hours ago

Guess this is another reason to migrate to local LLMs ASAP.

Comment by ipsum2 2 hours ago

This isn't a local LLM issue, Google is sending your Google Drive data to humans.

Comment by holyxing 33 minutes ago

[flagged]

Comment by dizhn 1 hour ago

[dead]

Comment by EGreg 3 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by matt3210 3 hours ago

share you system prompt and ill try your product. also, secure your system against zero day hacks

Comment by EGreg 2 hours ago

What do you mean by "your system prompt"?

You mean the default prompts we use in safebots? https://safebots.ai/safebots.html

As far as securing the system -- yes there are about 25 layers of isolation and hardening to get through, to pwn the system. Even if you got through all of it, the data can just be restored on a previous system. Here are just some:

1) Immutable startup disk, nix-based builds

2) M-of-N signatures on any supply chain updates

3) ZFS based disk encryption and sync

4) Safecloud for storage (https://safebots.github.io/Safecloud)

5) gVisor isolation for all Docker containers

6) All network egress goes to a second Safebox, whose job it is to actually enforce policies before signing transactions / sending emails / using your credentials. So even if you totally compromised the first Safebox somehow, or even a single app on it, the policies still get enforced

7) All credentials / keys encrypted and split between Safeboxes

I could go on...