Google Gemini routes personal Drive files and emails to human annotators | Hacker News Reader

Google Gemini routes personal Drive files and emails to human annotators

github.com

144 pointsgf7491824 comments

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.

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 .

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

There’s nowhere to go.

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?

"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

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.

These things make my blood boil!

Unfortunately, the alternatives are all so bad...

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

If only hardware wasn't crazy expensive :/

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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!

"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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com