It seems like an employee of the United States Organization for International Development (USAID) has not received sufficient scrutiny from Elon Musk and his team on Edgelord posters, but another unwelcome eye appears to be in the department. According to an IT Brew report, USAID staff were warned by leadership that Google’s AI assistant Gemini is likely recording conversations happening in the Google Workspace application.
USAID, like many businesses and government agencies, uses Google Workspace, a suite of cloud-based apps that include Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sheets and other tools. In January, Google announced it would deploy a Workspace update to expand access to Gemini. Gemini is the company’s flagship AI tool that helps you do draft emails and more, helps you code projects, and answer Google questions. Also, if it is done via Google Meet, it may take notes from meetings. This means you’re listening to the call. And, importantly, Gemini is turned on by default. You should choose to actively opt out.
So we’re back to the USAID office. They use Google Workspace and suddenly this AI assistant is involved in the workflow. According to Brew, staff were given a warning with the words that Gemini is active in the workspace and could record conversations that include everything from staff meetings to personnel reports. According to the report, staff meetings are buttoned up quite a bit after the agency notices AI, with few people willing to talk straight through the phone, with employees acting “sturdy and scripted” It was.
USAID staff were a bit paranoid about who was listening, but reportedly worried that Gemini’s addition coincided with the Trump administration, which chose to scrutinise the agency. A Google representative rebutted Brew against it, saying that USAID had signed a contract with Google before Trump took office and that Trump had not been instructed to set up workers to spy on.
That’s probably not a great comfort for staff who already have a lot to deal with. They have musk and his acolite in their office, labeling all the dollars they spent on things they don’t like as fraud or corruption, and a lot about their work being pushed on Twitter Misinformation, and the president has threatened to cut agency staff from 10,000 to 300. Now they have to see what they say so they don’t get sucked into the vacuum of Google’s latest data. But hey, at least the recordings are probably not used against them by their own government, so that’s something.
