Google’s Gemini AI Will Access Your Third Party Apps Again, Even If You Already Told It Not To

Why Don’t You Want Us To Help You?

If you love Google’s Gemini AI assistant you can ignore this as nothing will change for you as you will have granted it access to everything on your device already. 

On the other hand, if you would prefer Gemini keeps it’s digital fingers to itself you have some work to do.  Google sent out a rather poorly worded email to some users which informed them that as of today Google has granted Gemini access to apps such as WhatsApp, Messages, and Phone “whether your Gemini apps activity is on or off.”  Later in the notification they state that if you have already turned these features off then they will remain off, which seems to contradict the previous statement that Gemini will have access regardless if it is turned on or off.

The notification also implies that “users can block the apps that Gemini interacts with, but even in those cases, data is stored for 72 hours”, which definitely suggests that Gemini will still have access to those apps even after you specifically blocked them.   Google also neglected to describe how to turn these features off.  Ars Technica investigated and found numerous users also trying to determine how to disable these features and when they reached out to Google they were far less than helpful.

If you have removed Gemini from your devices you are probably safe, but you might want to check with Chrome if there is any activity registered.  Considering that Google is flipping switches behind the curtain you might even want to reinstall Gemini, verify you have manually disabled everything you can and then uninstall it again.

Sadly, resistance might be futile.