Monday, July 15, 2024

New Claims Raise Eyebrows On Google’s Gemini Accessing Personal Data Without Consent

In the last few years, the trend of generative AI has picked up the pace.

From OpenAI to Microsoft and Google, the list of AI tools and chatbots keeps increasing. This has also given rise to a plethora of opportunities that come with increased usage but at the same time, the drawbacks related to privacy must be addressed.

Keeping that thought in mind, many are now raising questions about Android maker Google’s Gemini chatbot. The latter was accused of accessing and reading personalized documents related to tax via the tool’s latest sidebar.

Image: Solen Feyissa / Unsplash

This new sidebar was launched on an array of Google apps including Docs and Drive, giving the AI chatbot the chance to see what users are working on and at the same time, provide suggestions and an analysis of the documents at hand.

However, one user was baffled to see the tool go way beyond its authorized limits by reading his personal tax documentation when no consent was given. He explained how his tax returns were very confidential and for Gemini to summarize it was an eye-opener.

Seeing Gemini ingesting data present inside private documents is a huge wake-up call as it’s doing tasks that nobody has asked it to do and users aren’t aware of how they can stop this.

The fact that AI tools are pulling out commands without receiving any prompts is worrisome and now they’re racing to ask Google how they can disable settings for Gemini to stop it from breaching their privacy.

What was even more shocking is when the user actually found the setting to switch such actions off, he was confused as they were already disabled so why was the AI tool doing something that it was never instructed to do?

While tech giant Google does provide support documents that detail more about how Gemini should be used across Google Drive, the company fails in terms of detailing how the feature could be disabled or how to stop the AI chatbot from getting access to data inside Google Drive.

Google has failed to address the concerns of many who don’t think this should ever happen. It’s a huge eye-opener to the world in terms of what Gemini is capable of and how AI cannot be trusted at any given point in time.
Read next: AI Writing in Education: Study Shows Alarming Detection Gaps
by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World
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