Google Drive's smart features read the inside of your files, not just their names

Published Oct 24, 2026, 7:30 AM EDT Anurag is an experienced journalist and author who’s been covering tech for the past 5 years, with a focus on Windows, Android, and Apple. He’s written for sites like Android Police, Neowin, Dexerto, and MakeTechEasier. Anurag’s always pumped about tech and loves getting his hands on the latest gadgets. When he's not procrastinating, you’ll probably find him catching the newest movies in theaters or scrolling through Twitter from his bed. Google Drive is a simple place to store documents you need across devices or share with others. Google has also added Gemini to Drive, so you can ask questions about your files and get summaries without reading through them yourself. As you'd guess, those features work by processing the information inside your documents. Google’s broader smart-feature settings also let it use your content and activity for personalization across Workspace, which goes far beyond keeping your files available across devices. I find that concerning because many of the files I save in Google Drive contain information I wouldn’t casually hand over to another service. Google’s smart features need more access than the name suggests Your documents provide the information underneath If you ask Gemini to find a payment deadline in a contract or summarize a report, it needs to process the text inside that document. The filename won’t tell it what you agreed to or what the report says. You’re giving it access to the details that make the file useful, which can also be the details you want to keep private. Google Drive already searches text within files, so content processing doesn’t begin with Gemini. The key is how that information can be used beyond finding the document you’re looking for. Google’s Workspace smart-feature controls cover personalized search, file suggestions, and Gemini assistance, including referencing Drive files from Gmail. The scope extends across several apps under the same setting. I don’t think “smart features” adequately explains that choice. It sounds like a setting for making the interface more helpful, and you could reasonably enable it without considering what it means for a folder full of contracts or financial records. Google describes the benefits clearly enough. The access those benefits require deserves the same prominence. There’s also a difference between asking an assistant to summarize a particular document and agreeing to broader personalization across the services you use. I might find the first useful for a report I’m working on without wanting the same arrangement for everything else I store. Those are separate decisions to me, and I want controls that let me treat them that way. Google’s privacy promises aren’t enough for me You should have clearer choices here Google says Gemini in Workspace doesn’t use your private content to train its generative AI models without permission. That’s the company’s stated policy, and I won't treat it as proof of how every part of its system works. More importantly, I can object to my documents being processed for features I don’t want without having to prove that Google is secretly training a model on them. If you’re uncomfortable with this access, you can open Google Drive on your computer and go to Settings -> Privacy -> Manage Workspace smart feature settings. You’ll find separate switches for smart features in Google Workspace and in other Google products. Disabling these settings doesn’t stop all content processing. Drive still processes content for ordinary search and security, and Google says learnings from earlier smart-feature improvements can persist after you opt out. I’m honestly sick of personalization in every consumer product. My documents can remain useful to me without becoming input for every new assistant Google adds to its products. You can keep your files under your control Self-hosting gives you a practical alternative I already use Nextcloud on an old laptop as a file server for my family. It gives us separate accounts, shared folders, and access from our phones and browsers, which covers much of what we need from Google Drive. You can run a similar setup on a compatible NAS and keep your documents on hardware you own. You don’t have to move everything at once, either. Google Drive can stay useful for sharing work with others, while you keep personal documents on your own server. That’s a more practical approach than expecting everyone you collaborate with to switch platforms because you’ve decided to self-host. However, keeping that server secure becomes your responsibility. You'll need to install updates, enable two-factor authentication, maintain separate backups, and avoid exposing it directly to the internet without securing remote access. I use Tailscale for my family’s Nextcloud server, so access is limited to devices on our private network. Choose a more secure cloud provider If you’d rather use a hosted service, I would choose iCloud over Google Drive because the two companies have different business models. Apple’s business is built primarily around selling hardware and services, and I’m more comfortable with those incentives than with Google’s dependence on advertising. Google’s business gives it a strong incentive to learn more about its users, and its push into AI gives me another reason to be cautious about how my information is used.