Google Says Gemini's Human Reviewers May See Excerpts of Users' Gmail and Drive Files

A Gemini help page says a subset of data from Connected Apps is reviewed by people, including "trained service providers", to debug and improve Google's services. The material that can be reviewed includes "interactions, summaries, excerpts and inferences from your relevant emails and files," according to the page. Google says it takes steps to protect privacy before review, "such as disconnecting interactions from your Google Account." It also advises: "Please don't connect your apps to Gemini Apps if they contain confidential information."

The change matters to anyone who has linked a personal Google account to Gemini, which can search an inbox or a Drive folder to answer questions. Contractors who label conversations may now see text from those sources.

The 2023 promise appeared in a Google blog post announcing what were then called Bard extensions. It said that if users chose the Workspace extensions, "your content from Gmail, Docs and Drive is not seen by human reviewers." That sentence is still in the post, but Google has added a note at the top headed "Update, October 16, 2026". The note says that when users turn on newer features linking Workspace apps to other Google services, that data may be used to personalise other experiences and, depending on their settings, to train generative AI models. It adds: "It can also be subject to human review in limited circumstances."

The update drew attention after a developer published a GitHub write-up describing what they called Gemini's "file leaking behavior". The author says Gemini sometimes pulls Workspace content into a chat when a user only mentions a personal matter such as a bill or a trip, without asking it to search. They say they saw four kinds of result across their tests: no retrieval, only metadata or a general summary, a few sentences quoted word for word that sometimes included personal details, and the full text of an email or document loaded into the chat. They tested this with a billing email from their internet provider.

The author argues that once full documents enter a conversation, the conversation can be selected for contractor review, and that automated scrubbing tools cannot reliably strip personal details out of free-form text. The evidence is the author's own account. The repository includes no transcripts, screenshots, trial counts or logs, and the author acknowledges that the behaviour is not consistent from one session to the next.

Google's documentation does not say Gemini loads whole files into chats. It describes the reviewed material as interactions, summaries, excerpts and inferences, and says reviewers may also see some Gmail or Photos content if a user submits feedback or if Google needs to deal with abuse or harm. The repository does not include any response from Google to its claims.

Google's help page names one way to avoid the risk: do not connect Gmail, Drive or other Workspace apps to the consumer Gemini app if they hold confidential information. It does not say whether people who connected accounts under the 2023 terms will be told about the change.