Everyone knows the problem: your personal information is scattered across countless apps on your smartphone. Flight details for your upcoming vacation are in an email, memories of your previous trip are lying around as photos in the cloud, and your true interests are revealed via your search history over the last few weeks. Linking these snippets manually is a tedious affair. However, imagine if there were an assistant that transformed your smartphone from a simple tool into a true digital partner, connecting all these dots for you intelligently and seamlessly.
Personal Intelligence Launches in the USA
This is exactly the vision behind Google’s new “Personal Intelligence” function for the Gemini app. It links your assistant with personal data from services such as Gmail, Google Photos, and YouTube. and Google Search. Google is thus playing to its greatest strategic advantage: the wealth of data it has built up over two decades.
This is also a direct attack in the arms race for the ultimate AI assistant, where competitors such as OpenAI or Anthropic naturally do not have access to such a wealth of data. OpenAI boss Sam Altman also dreams of a personal assistant like the one in the movie “Her”, but Google has the data it needs to realize this dream today. Google itself described this as an “important differentiator” and emphasized that the sensitive data is already securely stored by Google anyway. Isn’t this a clever ploy: by saying “Your data is still safe here”, Google is actually saying: “We already have all this anyway!”
An example from Josh Woodward, a vice president at Google, shows just how powerful this link can be. When he needed new tires for his minivan, he asked Gemini for the right size. The AI not only provided the technical specifications, but also suggested suitable all-weather tires based on family photos from past car trips. When Woodward needed the license plate number at the counter, Gemini extracted it from a photo in his media library and determined the specific trim level of the car by searching his emails.
Data Protection as an Opt-in: Google’s Compromise
Comprehensive access to private emails, photos, and search histories naturally raises considerable data protection concerns. However, Google addresses these directly itself. The function is deactivated by default, and you have to actively enable it (“opt-in”). You can control exactly which apps should be connected to Gemini. However, Google’s privacy promise is more nuanced than it seems at first glance.
Personal data from emails or photos is only referenced to answer queries. It is not used directly to train the global AI models. However, Google does train the models using prompts and responses from your chats, but only after personal data has been “filtered or obfuscated”, according to Google. Your information never leaves the Google ecosystem.
However, this tiny difference is unlikely to be comprehensible to many users. The concern remains that the “obfuscated” interaction data also allows conclusions to be drawn about private behavior patterns.
The Beta is Not Perfect
However, the system is not yet completely error-free. In the current beta version, Google warns against what the company calls “over-personalization” — a new marketing term for moments in which the AI hallucinates or simply draws the wrong conclusions. An example: Gemini might assume you are an ambitious tennis player, when all you do is ferry your child to tennis practice several times a week. But the weaknesses go even deeper beyond that. The AI sometimes ignores life changes such as divorces, mixes up family members, and forgets corrections. Hence, it can result in Gemini recommending a steakhouse, even though you made it clear a week earlier that you don’t eat meat.
Despite these teething problems, the potential is immense. Gemini could develop from a chatbot into a genuine personal assistant. For the moment, the function is only available as a beta for paying subscribers to the AI Pro and Ultra plans in the USA who are over 18 years old and use a personal Google account. Users of Workspace accounts for companies, educational institutions, or businesses are excluded. However, an expansion to other countries and also to include the free plan is already in the pipeline.
What do you think of this move? Is this the AI assistant of the future you’ve been waiting for, or are the deep insights into your data too far a bridge to cross for you? Let us know what you think in the comments below!
