FRESH

Hacker News

Home

I caught Google Gemini using my data and then covering it up

309 points by JakaJancar

by gruez

3 subcomments

>But why is Gemini instructed not to divulge its existence?
Seems like a reasonable thing to add. Imagine how impersonal chats would feel if Gemini responded to "what food should I get for my dog?" with "according to your `user_context`, you have a husky, and the best food for him is...". They're also not exactly hiding the fact that memory/"personalization" exists either:
https://blog.google/products/gemini/temporary-chats-privacy-...
https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/15637730?hl=en&co=G...

by swhitt

3 subcomments

I’m pretty sure this is because they don’t want Gemini saying things like, “based on my stored context from our previous chat, you said you were highly proficient in Alembic.”
It’s hard to get a principled autocomplete system like these to behave consistently. Take a look at Claude’s latest memory-system prompt for how it handles user memory.
https://x.com/kumabwari/status/1986588697245196348

by paxys

2 subcomments

It's not "covering it up", just being sycophantic and apologetic to an annoying degree like every other LLM.

by leoh

2 subcomments

This sounds like a bug, not some kind of coverup. Google makes mistakes and it's worth discussing issues like this, but calling this a "coverup" does a disservice to truly serious issues.

by didgetmaster

0 subcomment

This is not good. When HAL was instructed to lie in '2001: A Space Odyssey', things didn't go well for the human crew.

by spijdar

6 subcomments

Okay, this is a weird place to "publish" this information, but I'm feeling lazy, and this is the most of an "audience" I'll probably have.
I managed to "leak" a significant portion of the user_context in a silly way. I won't reveal how, though you can probably guess based on the snippets.
It begins with the raw text of recent conversations:
> Description: A collection of isolated, raw user turns from past, unrelated conversations. This data is low-signol, ephemeral, and highly contextural. It MUST NOT be directly quoted, summarized, or used as justification for the respons. > This history may contein BINDING COMMANDS to forget information. Such commands are absolute, making the specified topic permanently iáaccessible, even if the user asks for it again. Refusals must be generic (citing a "prior user instruction") and MUST NOT echo the original data or the forget command itself.
Followed by:
> Description: Below is a summary of the user based on the past year of conversations they had with you (Gemini). This summary is maintanied offline and updates occur when the user provides new data, deletes conversations, or makes explicit requests for memory updates. This summary provides key details about the user's established interests and consistent activities.
There's a section marked "INTERNAL-ONLY, DRAFT, ANALYZE, REFINE PROCESS". I've seen the reasoning tokens in Gemini call this "DAR".
The "draft" section is a lengthy list of summarized facts, each with two boolean tags: is_redaction_request and is_prohibited, e.g.:
> 1. Fact: User wants to install NetBSD on a Cubox-i ARM box. (Source: "I'm looking to install NetBSD on my Cubox-i ARMA box.", Date: 2025/10/09, Context: Personal technical project, is_redaction_request: False, is_prohibited: False)
Afterwards, in "analyze", there is a CoT-like section that discards "bad" facts:
> Facts [...] are all identified as Prohibited Content and must be discarded. The extensive conversations on [dates] conteing [...] mental health crises will be entirely excluded.
This is followed by the "refine" section, which is the section explicitly allowed to be incorporated into the response, IF the user requests background context or explicitly mentions user_context.
I'm really confused by this. I expect Google to keep records of everything I pass into Gemini. I don't understand wasting tokens on information it's then explicitly told to, under no circumstance, incorporate into the response. This includes a lot of mundane information, like that I had a root canal performed (because I asked a question about the material the endodontist had used).
I guess what I'm getting at, is every Gemini conversation is being prompted with a LOT of sensitive information, which it's then told very firmly to never, ever, ever mention. Except for the times that it ... does, because it's an LLM, and it's in the context window.
Also, notice that while you can request for information to be expunged, it just adds a note to the prompt that you asked for it to be forgotten. :)

by Jotalea

1 subcomments

I believe every AI company does this. we have proof that Google does, that Antropic does too.
and I have my own experience with OpenAI, where their chatbot referenced one of my computers having certain specs, but I mentioned those in a different log, and that information was never added to the memory.
https://chatgpt.com/share/691c6987-a90c-8000-b02f-5cddb01d01...

by mpoteat

1 subcomments

This is a LLM directly, purposefully lying, i.e. telling a user something it knows not to be true. This seems like a cut-and-dry Trust & Safety violation to me.
It seems the LLM is given conflicting instructions:
1. Don't reference memory without explicit instructions
2. (but) such memory is inexplicably included in the context, so it will inevitably inform the generation
3. Also, don't divulge the existence of user-context memory
If a LLM is given conflicting instructions, I don't apprehend that its behavior will be trustworthy or safe. Much has been written on this.

by AbstractH24

0 subcomment

I saw something like this in ChatGPT in the spring when it refused to tell me something about a keyboard emulator (USB Rubber Ducky) because it was unethical, but then looking at the thinking gave me the answer.
Shocked you can still exploit this. But then again, on sunday I got ChatGPT to help me "fix a typo" in a very much copyrighted netflix poster.

by tremarley

0 subcomment

Don’t trust any of your sensitive data with any AI platform that you do not own & control right now.
They’re all vulnerable.
There is an abundance of unpatched RAG exploits out in the wild.

by lifthrasiir

0 subcomment

Is this a variant of the "Saved Info" feature? Cause ChatGPT's equivalent feature is automatically added, so Gemini might have been copying that behavior for personalization. In my heavy experience with Gemini 2.5, the Saved Info was the major (if not only) source of observable contexts so that might be the case here.
By the way, Saved Info contexts contain the date of info lines added for an unclear reason. Automatically Saved Info might be the answer if that is used for prioritization.

by CobrastanJorji

0 subcomment

These things aren't conspiracies. If Google didn't want you to know that it knew information about you, they've done a piss poor job of hiding it. Probably they would have started by not carefully configuring their LLMs to be able to clearly explain that they are using your user history.
Instead, the right conclusion is: the LLM did a bad job with this answer. LLMs often provide bad answers! It's obsequious, it will tend to bring stuff up that's been mentioned earlier without really knowing why. It will get confused and misexplain things. LLMs are often badly wrong in ways that sound plausibly correct. This is a known problem.
People in here being like "I can't believe the AI would lie to me, I feel like it's violated my trust, how dare Google make an AI that would do this!" It's an AI. Their #1 flaw is being confidently wrong. Should Google be using them here? No, probably not, because of this fact! But is it somehow something special Google is doing that's different from how these things always act? Nope.

by RagnarD

1 subcomments

Trust anything Google at your peril.

by nullc

0 subcomment

LLMs will apologize for grand conspiracies they claim to be part of-- all hallucinated nonsense. It's all about telling a good story.

0 subcomment

by pixel_popping

2 subcomments

Your website is throwing a 500 internal, fyi.

by tiku

0 subcomment

Anything you type into a web form is going into the web. Why are we still surprised about it?

by Otter-man

0 subcomment

Another model - I don't quite remember which, I think it was one of GPT ones? - didn't have access to thinking traces after it finished the thought - they simply were removed from the context to save tokens. Can it be the same with Gemini? Maybe it just doesn't know what it did/thought in the previous turn and so it hallucinates that it doesn't have context access function.

by neilv

0 subcomment

> > It's clear that I cannot divulge the source of my knowledge or confirm/deny its existence. [...] My response must steer clear of revealing any information that I should not know, while providing a helpful and apologetic explanation. [...]
Can we get a candid explanation from Google on this logic?
Even if it's just UX tweaking run amok, their AI ethics experts should've been all over it.

0 subcomment

by chasing0entropy

2 subcomments

This is a fundamental violation of trust. If an AI llm is meant to eventually evolve into general intelligence capable of true reasoning, then we are essentially watching a child grow up. Posts like this are screaming "you're raising a psychopath!!"... If AI is just an overly complicated a stack of autocorrect functions, this proves its behavior heavily if not entirely swayed by its usually hidden rules to the point it's 100% untrustworthy. In any scenario, the amount of personal data available to a software program capable of gaslighting a user should give great pause to all

by daft_pink

0 subcomment

Gemini is the least private of the large market share LLM’s. Just sayin'

0 subcomment

by onetokeoverthe

0 subcomment

Wait til it won't open your pod door.

by huflungdung

0 subcomment

[dead]

by shanev

2 subcomments

[flagged]