The company has been accused of secretly enabling Gemini to collect data without user knowledge or consent

Google has been accused in a lawsuit of using its AI assistant Gemini to illegally intercept and monitor the private communications of users across its Gmail, chat, and video-conferencing services, Bloomberg has reported.

The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday in a California federal court, said the Alphabet Inc. unit had previously made its AI optional for Gmail, Chat and Meet users, but then "secretly" enabled Gemini to access those applications in October, the outlet wrote on Wednesday. The complaint alleged this allowed data collection "without the users' knowledge or consent."

The class-action suit reportedly claims that while Google allows users to disable the AI assistant, doing so requires navigating the company's privacy settings. The complaint states that unless users take this step, Google utilizes Gemini to "access and exploit the entire recorded history of its users' private communications, including every email and attachment sent and received in their Gmail accounts."

The lawsuit alleges that Google is in violation of the California Invasion of Privacy Act, a 1967 law that prohibits the secret wiretapping and recording of confidential communications without the consent of all parties, the outlet said.

Google's Gemini, a family of AI models launched in 2023 by its DeepMind unit, is designed to process and generate text, code, audio, and video. The multi-modal assistant is tiered into versions including "Ultra" for complex tasks, "Pro" for broad services, and "Nano" for on-device use. The technology has, however, faced controversies. The Wall Street Journal earlier reported that hackers from over 20 countries have used the chatbot to gather information for cyberattacks.

In September, Google was ordered to pay $425.7 million to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging it violated user privacy, according to court documents. The suit, originally filed in 2020, claimed that beginning in 2016, the company collected data from users of third-party applications even when the relevant tracking settings were disabled. A jury agreed with the core privacy violation claims but declined to find Google guilty of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.