Google Once Promised No Human Would See Your Emails Through Its SI. Now Some Might.

If you’ve hooked your Gmail or Google Drive up to Gemini, Google’s SI helper, a real person might end up reading some of it.

That’s not a rumor. It’s on Google’s own help page, and it caught fire online this weekend after a user flagged it and it shot up the tech forum Hacker News on Monday.

The old promise

Back in 2023, when Google first let its SI read your email and documents, it made a clear pledge in a company blog post: “If you choose to use the Workspace extensions, your content from Gmail, Docs and Drive is not seen by human reviewers.”

That sentence is still there. But on Oct. 16, Google added a note underneath. When users connect those apps to other Google features, it says, that data “can be used to train generative AI models” depending on a user’s settings, and “can also be subject to human review in limited circumstances.”

What the help page says now

Google’s page on linking apps to Gemini spells it out: “a subset of Connected Apps data processed by Gemini is reviewed by human reviewers (including trained service providers).”

What those reviewers can see includes “summaries, excerpts and inferences from your relevant emails and files.” And Google admits that sometimes the summary isn’t a summary at all: “where the email or file is brief or particularly relevant to respond to the prompt, the summary may just be the email or file.”

Then comes the warning, in Google’s own words: “Please don’t connect your apps to Gemini Apps if they contain confidential information that you wouldn’t want a reviewer to see.”

What Google says it does to protect you

Google says it does not train its SI directly on your inbox or Drive. It says that before outside reviewers see anything, it disconnects the chat from your Google account and strips out personal details, unless it’s looking into abuse or harm.

But once a chat has been reviewed, deleting it won’t make it go away. Google’s privacy page says reviewed chats “are not deleted when you delete your activity” and are kept for up to three years.

How to keep your inbox to yourself

The simplest fix is the one Google suggests: don’t link Gmail or Drive to Gemini if there’s anything in there you wouldn’t want a stranger to read. If you already have, you can disconnect them in Gemini’s settings and turn off the setting Google calls Keep Activity, which controls whether your chats are used to improve its products.

The bottom line

Free SI helpers aren’t really free. Somebody has to grade the homework, and at Google, that somebody may be looking at your mail. Read the fine print before you hand any SI the keys to your inbox.