Google is facing new backlash over privacy issues – this time involving Gemini, its artificial intelligence assistant, and new settings the company unveiled last month.
The proposed class action was filed Tuesday in federal court in San Jose, California, and first reported by Bloombergaccuses the company of illegally incorporating Gemini into Gmail, Google Chat and Meet, allowing its artificial intelligence to track and analyze users' private messages and attachments.
the complaint alleges that Google enabled Gemini by default in October of this year, without warning users or asking for consent. While Google provides an option to disable the tool, the lawsuit says such an action requires digging into layers of privacy settings that most users never see.
“The entire recorded history” of user communications
Leaving Gemini on, Google allegedly gave to the system access to the “entire recorded history” of user communications, potentially disrupting California Invasion of Privacy Law. The 1967 law prohibits the recording or eavesdropping of confidential conversations without the consent of all parties. The plaintiffs are seeking class action status and unspecified damages.
According to Bloomberg, Google did not. also commented by submission. But the company has previously touted Gemini as a feature that appears to be voluntary. If the case moves forward, it could test how existing privacy laws, written many decades before LLMs hit the market, apply to modern AI assistants and apps.
How Gemini fits into Alphabet's business
Even as Google is in the business of innovation, Google's core money-making operations still operate on a simple cycle: Free tools like Search, Gmail and YouTube attract billions of users, and their data fuels the ad targeting that generates almost all of its parent company Alphabet's profits. Gemini fits neatly into this system by making products more compelling, as well as providing new paid features in Google Cloud and Workspace that help diversify revenue streams outside of its core advertising business.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the company's AI ambitions are clearly aimed at keeping up with rivals such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon and Microsoft. Twins started out as Experimental chatbot Google Bardlaunched in early 2023, following OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Recurring privacy issues
In 2018, Google closed its social network Google+ after it was revealed that a bug had exposed the personal data of up to 500,000 users. In the same year, AP investigation found that Google continued to track users' locations even when they turned off Location History, prompting regulatory scrutiny and lawsuits that led to a nearly $400 million settlement with dozens of states in 2022. In addition, in 2023 the company paid nearly $100 million to California to resolve claims that the company misled users about how it collected and used location data.
However, none of this had a clear impact on Alphabet's profits. The company reported this $100 billion net profit in 2024, up more than 30% from the previous year.
