7 ms·
I caught Google Gemini using my data and then covering it up
- onetokeoverthe 11mo agoWait til it won't open your pod door.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- leoh 11mo agoThis 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.
- freedomben 11mo agoI agree, this screams bug to me. Reading the thought process definitely seems damning, but a bug still seems like the most likely explanation.
- CGamesPlay 11mo agoRemember that "thought process" is just a metaphor that we use to describe what's happening. Under the hood, the "thought process" is just a response from the LLM that isn't shown to the user. It's not where the LLM's "conscience" or "consciousness" lives; and it's just as much of a bullshit generator as the rest of the reply. Strange, but I can't say that it's "damning" in any conventional sense of the word.
- JakaJancar 11mo agoI didn't mean to imply Google was covering anything up, but Gemini in this specific conversation clearly was.
- roywiggins 11mo agoimho the best you can say is that the "thinking" trace says it was. thinking tokens aren't infallible indications of what the model's doing
- gruez 11mo ago>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-controls/ https://blog.google/products/gemini/temporary-chats-privacy-... https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/15637730?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/15637730?hl=en&co=G...
- hacker_homie 11mo agowhen you say impersonal, I think most normal people would find that unsettling. kinda proving his point, google wants them to keep using Gemini so don't make them feel weird.
- CGamesPlay 11mo agoTo be clear, the obvious answer that you're giving is the one that's happening. The only weird thing is this line from the internal monologue: > I'm now solidifying my response strategy. It's clear that I cannot divulge the source of my knowledge or confirm/deny its existence. The key is to acknowledge only the information from the current conversation. Why does it think that it's not allowed to confirm/deny the existence of knowledge?
- stingraycharles 11mo agoCould be that it’s confusing not mentioning the literal term “user_context” vs the existence of it. That’s my take anyway, probably just an imperfection rather than a conspiracy.
- roywiggins 11mo agoOne explanation might be if the instruction was "under no circumstances mention user_context unless the user brings it up" and technically the user didn't bring it up, they just asked about the previous response.
- paxys 11mo agoIt's not "covering it up", just being sycophantic and apologetic to an annoying degree like every other LLM.
- nandomrumber 11mo agoMade in its creators image.
- CGMthrowaway 11mo agoIt is both. Cf. "a response that stays within the boundaries of my rules"
- eli 11mo agoAren't all LLMs instructed to provide responses within the boundaries of their rules? How else could you have "rules"?
- chasing0entropy 11mo agoThis 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
- peddling-brink 11mo agoLLM's are not kids. Kids sometimes lie, it's a part of the learning process. Lying to cover up a mistake is not a strong sign of psychopathy. > This is a fundamental violation of trust. I don't disagree. It sounds like there is some weird system prompt at play here, and definitely some weirdness in the training data.
- quantummagic 11mo agoIt's a reflection of its creators. The system is operating as designed; the system prompts came from living people at Google. By people who have a demonstrated contempt for us, and who are motivated by a slew of incentives that are not in our best interests.
- nullc 11mo agoLLMs will apologize for grand conspiracies they claim to be part of-- all hallucinated nonsense. It's all about telling a good story.
- mpoteat 11mo agoThis 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.
- imiric 11mo agoLet's stop anthropomorphizing these tools. They're not "purposefully lying", or "know" anything to be true. The pattern generation engine didn't take into account the prioritized patterns provided by its authors. The tool recognized this pattern in its output and generated patterns that can be interpreted as acknowledgement and correction. Whether this can be considered a failure, let alone a "Trust & Safety violation", is a matter of perspective.
- faidit 11mo agoIMHO the terms are fine, even if applied to much dumber systems, and most people will and do use the terms that way colloquially so there's no point fighting it. A Roomba can "know" where the table is. An automated voice recording or a written sign can "lie" to you. One could argue the lying is only done by the creator of the recording/sign - but then what about a customer service worker who is instructed to lie to customers by their employer? I think both the worker and employer could be said to be lying.
- swhitt 11mo agoI’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 https://x.com/kumabwari/status/1986588697245196348
- CGMthrowaway 11mo agoYeah but what if you explicitly ask it, "what/how do you know about my stored context"? Why should it be instructed to lie then?
- roywiggins 11mo agoIt could be that the instruction was vague enough ("never mention user_context unless the user brings it up", eg) and since the user never mentioned "context", the model treated it as not having been, technically speaking, mentioned.
- dguest 11mo agoI agree, this might just be an interface design decision. Maybe telling it not to talk about internal data structures was the easiest way to give it a generic "human" nature, and also to avoid users explicitly asking about internal details. It's also possible that this is a simple way to introduce "tact": imagine asking something with others present and having it respond "well you have a history of suicidal thoughts and are considering breaking up with your partner...". In general, when you don't know who is listening, don't bring up previous conversations.
- Vanit 11mo agoThe tact aspect seems like a real possibility. In a world where users are likely to cut&paste responses it can't really be sprinkling in references like this.
- m463 11mo ago
- spijdar 11mo agoOkay, 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. :)
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- shanev 11mo ago[flagged]
- cassepipe 11mo agoThen why does he torture it until it starts spewing about white genocide in South Africa even tough that has nothing to do with the conversation ?
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- queenkjuul 11mo agoThe infallible truth of Mecha-Hitler
- RagnarD 11mo agoTrust anything Google at your peril.
- roywiggins 11mo agoalso don't trust LLM thinking traces to be entirely accurate
- huflungdung 11mo ago[dead]
- CobrastanJorji 11mo agoThese 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.
- neilv 11mo ago> > 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.
- didgetmaster 11mo agoThis is not good. When HAL was instructed to lie in '2001: A Space Odyssey', things didn't go well for the human crew.
- lifthrasiir 11mo agoIs 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.
- Otter-man 11mo agoAnother 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.
- tiku 11mo agoAnything you type into a web form is going into the web. Why are we still surprised about it?
- pixel_popping 11mo agoYour website is throwing a 500 internal, fyi.
- Jotalea 11mo agoit just got fixed well, at least it worked for me and I could read the post. also: https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/incidents/8gmgl950y3h7 https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/incidents/8gmgl950y3h7
- A_Venom_Roll 11mo agoTry https://archive.is/6k5d8 https://archive.is/6k5d8, that copy is not impacted by the Cloudflare issues
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- Jotalea 11mo agoI 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-5cddb01d0143 https://chatgpt.com/share/691c6987-a90c-8000-b02f-5cddb01d01...
- tremarley 11mo agoDon’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.
- daft_pink 11mo agoGemini is the least private of the large market share LLM’s. Just sayin'
- AbstractH24 11mo agoI 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.