Google's Gemini sends some personal Drive and Gmail content to human reviewers

A Hacker News post with 242 points this morning pointed at a GitHub repository by a user called thisisme6598. The repository says Google's Gemini pulls text from a user's Drive files and Gmail into chats on its own. It says those chats can then go to human reviewers. The one-person documentation is new. The policy behind it is on Google's own site.

What Google's privacy hub says

Google's Gemini Apps Privacy Hub was last updated on 26 October. The hub says "a subset of chats are reviewed by human reviewers," including Google's trained service providers. Reviewers judge whether a response was low-quality, inaccurate or harmful. Reviewed chats stay for up to three years. That retention survives a user deleting their activity. Temporary chats are the way to opt out of review on a personal account. A Workspace licence is the other way: Google says Workspace prompts are not read by humans and not used for training.

Where Drive and Gmail come in

Gemini for Drive is covered by the same page. Google says human reviewers "may read, annotate, and process interactions data" for Gemini in Drive. If Connected Apps are on in Gemini, a conversation can ingest Drive files and emails. The repository on GitHub says the ingestion happens without a user asking for a file by name. The repository shows four kinds of outcome: no file pull, a metadata summary, a 2 to 4 sentence quote with personal data, and the whole file. No independent lab has published a reproduction.

What this means for a user with Connected Apps on

A user connected Drive and Gmail to Gemini to search their own documents. They already agreed to a term that was always there. The change is that the term now reaches further. A casual chat about "the lease my landlord sent last week" can pull the lease in. If Keep Activity is on, the chat is eligible for human review. If it is reviewed, it stays three years after the user deletes it.

What to do

The two switches are in the Gemini app. Turn off Google Workspace in Personal Intelligence, Connected Apps. Turn off Smart Features in Gmail. Use a Workspace account for anything a reviewer must not see. Turn Keep Activity off for a personal account. Use a temporary chat when the subject touches a private document.

A team at a company does the same work at the policy level. A data protection officer reviewing Connected Apps for staff should state the default and name a corporate alternative. A security lead at a regulated firm should check whether personal Gmail accounts holding work files have Connected Apps on.

Source

Documentation of Gemini File Leaking Behavior, thisisme6598. Gemini Apps Privacy Hub, Google. Google Gemini Routes Personal Drive, Gmail to Human Reviewers, AI Weekly.