The American corporation Google has been accused of illegally tracking users' personal data using its artificial intelligence (AI) model Gemini. The lawsuit was filed in federal court in San Jose, California, reports Bloomberg, citing materials from the case.
Google claims that it uses the Gemini support feature to collect and store information about users' private correspondence in the Gmail and Google Chat applications, as well as for video conferences on the Google Meet platform. Previously, this feature was manually enabled by users of these applications. However, since October, the AI support has been “secretly“ enabled “without the knowledge or consent of users“. It is noted that Gemini can be disabled through the app's privacy settings.
According to Bloomberg, Google is accused of violating the California Privacy Act, passed in 1967.
In 2023, Google introduced the Gemini chatbot, which can understand, summarize, process and combine various types of information, including text, code, audio, images and video. According to The Wall Street Journal, hackers from over 20 countries used the Gemini chatbot to obtain information in preparation for cyberattacks in 2024.