Yet another Hacker News

Google Gemini routes personal Drive files and emails to human annotators

649 points gf74918 18 hours ago 137 comments

ninininino 16 hours ago | parent

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

ipsum2 15 hours ago | parent

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

sumeno 11 hours ago | parent

Only if you connect it to Gemini. If you're using a local LLM you probably aren't connecting your Google Drive to Gemini

ipsum2 10 hours ago | parent

No, you can also inadvertently trigger Gemini, by accidental click. One tap and your data gets sent.

rustyhancock 16 hours ago | parent

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 .

mistrial9 15 hours ago | parent

"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

bemtevi 12 hours ago | parent

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

EmX_3000 16 hours ago | parent

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

reasonableklout 15 hours ago | parent

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!

realsarm 15 hours ago | parent

"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

asxndu 16 hours ago | parent

These things make my blood boil!

Unfortunately, the alternatives are all so bad...

xnickb 16 hours ago | parent

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.

sdoering 15 hours ago | parent

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.

chneu 15 hours ago | parent

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.

kevg123 12 hours ago | parent

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.

eks391 14 hours ago | parent

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

qwerpy 14 hours ago | parent

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.

kevg123 12 hours ago | parent

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.

Gigachad 12 hours ago | parent

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.

You could write down a document on exactly how to pull the data off the backup.

mapontosevenths 9 hours ago | parent

I use Mega. They have the cheapest per TB S3 compatible service I can find, and they've actually been very reliable. I use Kopia to perform (and encrypt) the backups, so they never get anything other than the raw data and it's all done on a schedule.

I think I paid $300/year for 20TB, so it's not free, but it's offsite, well encrypted, and I'm pretty sure it will still be there if I need it next week.

munk-a 14 hours ago | parent

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.

kevg123 13 hours ago | parent

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.

mickael-kerjean 14 hours ago | parent

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

nunez 13 hours ago | parent

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

kevg123 12 hours ago | parent

NextCloud isn't too bad

Gigachad 12 hours ago | parent

These days I just don't trust Nextcloud exposed to the public internet. You basically need to be a full time dev ops / security engineer to keep on top of things like PHP2Shell fast enough.

My setup is Nextcloud behind tailscale and if I need to share something I just put it on google drive temporarily.

kevg123 12 hours ago | parent

With a reverse proxy, your only public endpoint is port 443 and nginx or whatever webserver you choose. Sure, the web server might also have zero days but the attack surface is relatively small.

Gigachad 12 hours ago | parent

Which was enough exposure to get a shell on your server via the recent php exploit. If you run a public facing nextcloud server you need to be ready to update at least within an hour of patches releasing.

kevg123 11 hours ago | parent

NextCloud AIO runs in Docker containers, so it'd be a jump to break out of that, but, yes, they could exfiltrate your data, though the PHP2Shell PoCs I've seen aren't trivial (unlike the Alpine ssh vulnerability).

I guess it's choose your poison. What are?

P(companies&governments spying on you)

P(hacker stealing your files)

The impacts of the latter are probably more dangerous but unless you're a juicy target, I'd imagine most hackers are going to go for rich grandmas (sadly). So my gut feelings are ~0.95 and ~0.04, respectively.

Gigachad 8 hours ago | parent

For me I don't share that many files with others and the ones I do share are usually less confidential than the rest. So I run Nextcloud behind tailscale and put just the share files on google drive.

I might eventually look in to an automatic updates setup for nextcloud to keep up on patches faster than I could do it manually.

nicce 15 hours ago | parent

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

matchstickman23 14 hours ago | parent

If only hardware wasn't crazy expensive :/

munk-a 14 hours ago | parent

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.

afarah1 11 hours ago | parent

Proton has Mail, Drive, and a LLM web chat, they all work pretty well for me.

mapontosevenths 9 hours ago | parent

I've been a proponent of theirs for years, and I'm still a user. However, their CEO's recent behavior and the public backlash have got me really nervous that there might be a major breach, and that if there is they'll handle it poorly. Failing that I wonder if the company can stay viable with a leader like that.

Vibe coding is one thing, but calling employees losers for caring about quality.. It sounds like he forgot why people use proton.

onel 3 hours ago | parent

It's really not though. It has become 1 click to install a self hosted google photos/drive. We just need people to be more aware of the alternatives

easytiger 16 hours ago | parent

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

bri3d 14 hours ago | parent

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.

jttnr 15 hours ago | parent

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.

hek2sch 15 hours ago | parent

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.

pmdr 15 hours ago | parent

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

sans_souse 14 hours ago | parent

So true!

bri3d 15 hours ago | parent

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.

snailmailman 14 hours ago | parent

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

gf74918 14 hours ago | parent

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.

tomrod 10 hours ago | parent

This seems extraordinarily not wise.

mapontosevenths 9 hours ago | parent

Don't worry, it's safe because they also send your personal files to be inspected by extremely poorly paid human reviewers who will definitely keep your bitcoin keys safe for you.

mentalgear 14 hours ago | parent

Corporate Harassment

giancarlostoro 12 hours ago | parent

> 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.

scuttlebutt98 12 hours ago | parent

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.

giancarlostoro 12 hours ago | parent

Sure, but its just annoying. Remember the employees came up with the "Don't be evil" slogan, which wasn't even official, but I'm sure people working here patted themselves on the back over it, well, this is all evil.

scuttlebutt98 12 hours ago | parent

Yep true. But I've learned to stop worrying about it long ago. A corporation's gonna corpo. Best we can do is avoid using their services and work on better open source alternatives.

monegator 9 hours ago | parent

yet they cannot give the simplest thing back, like letting me set the goddamn language for the tool instead of assuming based on location

j16sdiz 6 hours ago | parent

Yes, but many data company lure just giving up data by providing reasonably good service. Google is just doing the bare minimal shitiest service.

littlecranky67 5 hours ago | parent

Google (especially Android) is one giant dark pattern.

giancarlostoro 12 hours ago | parent

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

fHr 11 hours ago | parent

only leetcode brainlets left at that company lmao

maybewhenthesun 14 hours ago | parent

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.

EMM_386 14 hours ago | parent

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?

heikkilevanto 13 hours ago | parent

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?

taneq 12 hours ago | parent

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.

gib444 6 hours ago | parent

Are we talking terabytes?

How many of those photos do you need?

You can use de-googled phones and Immich. I use a sync app ("FolderSync") to upload-then-delete to my server over Tailscale, then Immich picks them up. So I never have storage issues on my phone.

Immich looks like they're trying hard to be a Google Photos clone as far as I can tell. It's a good Android app

k1t 5 hours ago | parent

Bit of a tangent, but +1 for FolderSync.

I was looking for things like backing up my phone contents to a PC or syncing a music/photo library to my phone and the options I found were brittle python scripts using adb.

FolderSync does exactly what I want and just works. No affiliation just happy customer/user.

littlecranky67 5 hours ago | parent

Proton.

comboy 2 hours ago | parent

I like Ente. It's cloud photos storage but e2e encrypted.

But if you have them already on your server then just some tailscale/wireguard perhaps might work for you.

xlayn 13 hours ago | parent

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...

reorder9695 13 hours ago | parent

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

topaztee 12 hours ago | parent

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

agumonkey 12 hours ago | parent

never tried 1-2-3 rule of backups ?

(me neither, but i should)

topaztee 12 hours ago | parent

me neither, but i should

kevg123 12 hours ago | parent

Attach a USB hard drive and create a nightly rsync job

jbverschoor 48 minutes ago | parent

Fire or theft and all is gone. Great advice!

sirtaj 5 minutes ago | parent

It is, actually. It's the first step of a 3-2-1 backup strategy. For most people, this is a massive, huge improvement by itself.

taneq 12 hours ago | parent

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.

mdavidn 12 hours ago | parent

Use Arq to send a snapshot to S3 daily, encrypted with a key you keep safe separately.

Gigachad 12 hours ago | parent

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.

reorder9695 5 minutes ago | parent

I just use a wireguard VPN with a domain name I already had and DDNS configured, what benefits does Tailscale bring for a situation where only a couple of devices need access?

gib444 6 hours ago | parent

Rclone/restic to B2

scuttlebutt98 12 hours ago | parent

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.

gla67890543 14 hours ago | parent

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

whatever1 13 hours ago | parent

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.

bemtevi 13 hours ago | parent

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

Gigachad 12 hours ago | parent

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

NavinF 9 hours ago | parent

He said "That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure". Gotta love quoting without context.

NietTim 4 hours ago | parent

Google has been doing this kind of shady, privacy destroying, stuff for forever, this has little to do with AI and everything to do what a bad company google is.

rbobby 13 hours ago | parent

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

dizhn 13 hours ago | parent

I use Gemini and every day it tries to connect all these apps together. It always uses reassuring language like "You are in control of your data". That wording actually makes me take a second look at what I am approving.

alex1138 6 hours ago | parent

This comment was [dead]. The poster's account is from 2022 and has 2000+ karma

Does HN like censorship that much?

dizhn 4 hours ago | parent

Thanks for looking out my friend.

xlayn 13 hours ago | parent

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?

fierycatnet 13 hours ago | parent

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.

0xbadcafebee 12 hours ago | parent

Gemini is the worst AI agent I've used so no big loss here. Another great move to get people to move off Google services.

jan_m_savage 11 hours ago | parent

I don't have any data on google drives. :) Didn't want to trust them from the get go.

m4rtink 10 hours ago | parent

Maybe actually put there some garbage data & have them choke on it ? ;-)

zx8080 11 hours ago | parent

Now it's the best time to establish a company: you break the law and say "It's AI, not me". And no one goes to jail.

drnick1 11 hours ago | parent

Another good reason to fully de-Google. And de-Apple, de-Microsoft, ...

800xl 9 hours ago | parent

Agree. I've given up on cloud services as much as possible. Even if they are initially trustworthy they can always change the terms.

statsins 11 hours ago | parent

Privacy is irrelevant going forward

lhk931122 10 hours ago | parent

I think it's right to keep the Google side as a tool, and have an AI that plays a personal assistant role and work by talking with it. Honestly, checking everything one by one is too much, so I wish it would rate the importance and filter down to only the things I really need to check.

m4rtink 10 hours ago | parent

They could have had everything - infinite money and control, being a good little monopolist.

But no, they had to go full AI psychosis - and it will cost them everything.

advael 10 hours ago | parent

Google and the companies it considers its competitors in a given space (e.g. primarily Microsoft in "workspace" and cloud storage, for example) have already demonstrated for over a decade that they're willing to use any data you store in their services for any purpose they feel like, and often much of this is written into EULAs, but also it doesn't seem to matter if it isn't. I hope that if this is your first exposure to this basic fact, it encourages you to stop trusting google and look for alternatives with auditable guarantees

ggm-at-algebras 9 hours ago | parent

Thank you kind stranger for motivating me to get up and check all my Google accounts and legacy Gsuite. And yes, to my surprise this did appear enabled, and now isn't.

thatsadude 9 hours ago | parent

With all that and that their models are benchmaxxed to the gill; they are always far worse in real-world coding. I'm sure they have an organizational issue. They should rebuild like Meta and fire all the self-celebrated middle managers.

vinay_ys 9 hours ago | parent

So, if you want privacy from human reviewers, pay up $7/month (with an annual plan) and signup for Business Starter which comes with basic usage limits for Gemini. Then, for more gemini usage pay up more for AI Ultra plans.

Strangely, they let you opt out of using your data for AI training, but not opt out of human reviewers.

krige 5 hours ago | parent

Morbidly amusing to see the tech giants reinvent the Mechanical Turk from first principles.

prtmnth 5 hours ago | parent

Thank you so much for sharing this. I got tired of denying the popup that Google shows you almost every other time to use Google Search (AI mode shows up by default) and Gemini. Eventually I relented and clicked allow just to stop getting the notification. I spent the last 30 minutes reviewing and undoing that.

Please note - I had to disconnect connected apps from both the Gemini App and Google search separately. They don't share settings. Just Google things I guess.

I look forward to stop using more and more Google products and shift to alternatives completely.

pxtail 1 hour ago | parent

In my perspective the interconnection between all their services paired with lingering danger of all encompassing ban in case of perceived misuse is serving as big deterrent - I won't be trying any Gemini or AI offer from them because I don't want to have all my accounts banned without recourse in case of for example some incorrectly interpreted "cyber" usage.

terom 1 hour ago | parent

https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/16836988

> How your data is used

> This data is used to create personal insights about you, your relationships, and the people and things in your world. For example, depending on your settings, your 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.

https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/16836988#common_que...

> How your Connected Apps data is used to improve Google services

> Gemini Apps activity, which includes data from apps you connect, is used to improve Google services for everyone, including by training generative AI models, if your Keep Activity setting is on.

> When connected to Gemini, a subset of Connected Apps data processed by Gemini is reviewed by human reviewers (including trained service providers) to debug our services, help keep them safe, and improve them.

> Human reviewers improve Google services, including generative AI. Reviewers assess if Gemini responses were low-quality, inaccurate, or harmful. They also suggest better responses. We use their suggestions to help our models respond better in the future.

> Important: Please don't connect your apps to Gemini Apps if they contain confidential information that you wouldn’t want a reviewer to see.

altmanaltman 48 minutes ago | parent

> Important: Please don't connect your apps to Gemini Apps if they contain confidential information that you wouldn’t want a reviewer to see.

But also we will keep pestering you to allow access to all your emails and files. Like why would anything in my gmail be non confidential, its not a message board.

MonkeyClub 25 minutes ago | parent

> This data is used to create personal insights about you, your relationships, and the people and things in your world.

From what we found out about a few days ago, Apple Intelligence does the same thing on your device using your data without any consent prompt.

At least they claim the associations never leave your device, while Google is cloud-first.