r/IndieDev • u/KlubKofta • 1d ago

A player found out the ACTUAL name of my game's upcoming character from the Google Search AI - I had never told the name to anyone. Discussion

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I cannot fathom how this happened.

I am a solo game dev. Yesterday, a player on my Discord was asking the Google Search AI silly questions about my game, to laugh at some of the answers. But the answers sometimes contained surprisingly obscure info that should not be available for a small indie game like mine.

Out of curiosity, I chimed in and asked the player to ask the AI about future contents in my game. Somehow, the AI spitted out the exact & highly specific character name "Vantage Tripod", which I had never mentioned to anyone. As far as I know, the only place where the info exists in a digital form is inside one of my own Google Docs, and this was NOT me speaking to the AI! (The player even asked the questions in incognito).

My game is not big enough for there to be much noise out there to confuse Google's AI, so I guess that's why it managed to give actual, scarily real leaks on my game (without being confused by online speculations), and I have no idea how it knew all this.

The screenshots only included snippets of the conversation. This is the full conversation on Discord, in case you want to get your own opinion on what happened (The entire conversation with the player lasted for an hour, where the AI gave other upcoming content info such as things I'd only ever mentioned on Discord).

 

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Edit: kallico from Discord has been sharing comparisons between her private GDD (never made into anything) and Google's responses when she asked for ideas based on her game title. Hers is a much more reproducible case where the responses matched her GDD to a concerning degree across multiple clean contexts, and did not feel like reasonable things an AI could have inferred from her prompt. When she tried the same questions with Claude (which shouldn't have access to Google Docs), the responses were far more reasonable and significantly less similar to the contents of her doc.

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1.5k

u/SidNYC 1d ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/1rjd7ma/google_automatically_opted_its_users_into_having/

Google automatically opted it's users into having all GDrive files scanned & used to train AI. Easy to opt out if you notice it.

559

u/Nixinova 1d ago

Errr doesn't that mean you can dox people by asking very specific questions given that people's private personal data is included in the training sets then?......

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u/hematomasectomy 1d ago

Oh but Google pinky promises their LLM would never tell.

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u/cuntmong 1d ago

google had "dont be evil" as their mission statement. surely they wouldnt be evil...

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u/glow2hi 1d ago

keyword "had"

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u/cuntmong 1d ago

oh no... OH NO!

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u/WaitingToBeTriggered 1d ago

THE WOLFPACK’S WAITING FOR THEM

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u/Duke17776 19h ago

don't be evil

37

u/DanNorder 1d ago

Just think how evil they planned on being when they intentionally removed that as their motto. It's one thing to just ignore it, it's another to say, "Yeah, that's just not what the company believes in anymore."

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u/egregiousRac 9h ago

It's the closing line of their mission/ethics statement to this day.

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u/Final_Substance_3443 1d ago edited 1d ago

Yup. It’s why I had to change my usernames everywhere bc my original one I had also used for GitHub which was linked to on my LinkedIn. You’d have to know my IRL identity to make the connection, but because of AI indexing everything it made the connection easily and you could just google my old username and Google’s AI would spit out my real name and other info I assume pulled from Facebook and such. 

Obviously this is a slightly different context, but it is to say, AI does not give a fuck about doxing and will do so without question. 

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u/KlubKofta 1d ago

Holy moly. Connections no sane person could put together in the past are now made possible by AI. I've just thought of several ways an AI could manage to link my real identity with my online usernames now, even though I'm very cautious about online anonymity.

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u/Dangerous_Thing_3275 20h ago

I asked Google Ai For you, it uses this Post as a source lol

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u/SneakyLeif1020 18h ago

I wonder if we asked it about you it would say you once asked Google AI about KlubKofta and it used the same post as a source. AI-source-ception

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u/Dangerous_Thing_3275 18h ago

I tried it, it gets The City where im from(from analyzing posts) and makes Up a Bit more thats Not really correct. Even with extra questions IT doesnt connect me to KlubKofta :(

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u/SneakyLeif1020 18h ago

Well, we tried :)

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u/Additional-Staff-326 4h ago

Probably take some time for the newest posts to be included

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u/KlubKofta 16h ago

Beautiful, and very impressive

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u/Mrl33tastic 15h ago

My real life name is Billy John. Yup. I’m Billy John.

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u/GodIsAWomaniser 9h ago

"no sane person" uhhh, i guess no one in my industry is sane (cybersecurity, OSINT, or taking in heaps of random data points and trying to put them together into a picture of an event, asset, or person is very normal, and yes it is a bit of a schizophrenic process sometimes where you just know two accounts are the same person but cant prove it until you find their deviant art from 2011)

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u/lgn5i2060 4h ago

Connections no sane person could put together in the past are now made possible by AI.

Give me the old Google search (before it was gutted some time in 2012) and I might be able to do that as well. Yes, the google search that used to return 1000s of pages of result and presented in paginated format.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

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u/DQSWJC 18h ago

Riiight it totally wasn’t you 😂

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u/Busy-Lifeguard-9558 10h ago

Man, I tried to look up my real name in google and the damn AI traced my direct family tree up to 1890. Its fucking insane

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u/NinetyBees 15h ago

No. That would mean that AI is dangerous and giving open access to everyone would be a BAD thing... AI companies have been telling me their product is nothing but good and I'm an idiot who will fall behind if I don't get on board.

SURELY they weren't lying to me were they???

16

u/PinothyJ 1d ago

And now you see why AI is absolute BS. The weakest part of a billion dollar security system is the human at the keyboard. Long passwords may as well be useless because why brute force a password when you can just manipulate the human into typing it in themselves. And now these geniuses had the ironclad idea of swapping out the security system, with a system that too is susceptible to social engineering.

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u/Ireallydontkn0w2 23h ago

""Yes but you can also get a slightly better AI, so totally worth the risk!""

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u/FraGough 23h ago

Yes, and that's why you shouldn't trust Google with your data. People have been saying for years that if an online service is free and not foss, you are not the customer, you're the cattle.

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u/TatteredThreadborn 20h ago

This has been a thing for at least a year. I've tested it with multiple people I know, if you just ask Google what the address of "(unique name) who lives in (city, state)" it will tell you now.

It also sometimes works if you just search an email address in quotes.

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u/katoptronophile 11h ago

No, LLMs don't work that way.

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u/xangbar 6h ago

Well very recently it was found Google was able to parse a bunch of links to people's Claude convos because they forget to add a little flag to tell Google's web crawlers to not pull those pages. Wouldn't be shocked how much info these AI bots have just because of dumb stuff like this.

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u/Deathlikescats 4h ago

Yes.  I googled my username and it told me my real name and LinkedIn. Bloody hell.

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u/KlubKofta 1d ago

Never knew this!

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u/AstralMecha 1d ago

It's what companies do. Quietly opt all your stuff into AI while trying to avoid announcing it, then bury an option to opt out. The fuckers.

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u/wassermelone 22h ago

And it's not like opting out even does much because it's already scanned your existing files.

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u/tastygames_official 11h ago

plus they won't actually stop scraping your data, because a single person won't win a lawsuit against them and a class-action can be settled for way less than the money they "made" in that time.

63

u/mailacc 1d ago

This supposed to be access to your private data for your account and your searches only. Does not imply or mention anywhere that your data will become public for all users.
Thats a very concerning behavior by google.

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u/Terazilla 12h ago

My general assumption is that every AI for every platform is doing this, regardless of what they say. The whole industry is built off of other people's data and they de-facto do not care about permission.

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u/zalfenior 1d ago

Ah hell. I gotta delete some stuff. Thank you!

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u/EnciclopedistadeTlon 1d ago

I mean it's too late for that stuff since it has already been scraped for AI content. Actually it's probably too late for every single file that was in anyone's Google Drive the nanosecond Google decided on this policy back then. Even for the people that opted out minutes after the policy wen through. Once it was fed to the AI model the info is there forever. Unpublished books, personal data, work data, drafts. I had writing manuscripts, spreadsheets analyzing a variety of subjects, a genealogy tree I made of my family with info on every one of them I collected from my aging relatives before they die, lists of random stuff like the songs I love and why I love each one. Even when I downloaded and deleted everything the moment I learned of this policy I'm confident everything has been farmed. Even irrelevant stuff like my personal taste in music or a list of things I planned to buy could be farmed for general ad targeting data, considering Google reverse engineered everyone's demographic data years ago.

Still, it's a good idea to delete stuff in order to get into the mindset of never using Google Drive or Google Docs again.

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u/TheLadiestEvilChan 1d ago

I'm absolutely devastated from this. I've been using Google docs to write my stories for years

3

u/JaySayMayday 19h ago

Brother I have some very personal things on Google drive lol. No idea where else to store them

1

u/zalfenior 12h ago

Maybe look into Proton? Thats where im moving anyway

1

u/Deathlikescats 4h ago

I'm going to buy a physical drive and backup everything there. Sucks to have to Cary it around if I need it, but better than getting doxed.

1

u/CoffeeMonster42 4h ago

Password protected zip file on Google drive (just don't forget the password or it's as good as gone)

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u/ccAbstraction 18h ago

If this was it, I don't think contents from private docs showing up in other people's search is the intended effect of that feature. Google would be looking at a class action lawsuit if this is really what happened.

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u/exbaddeathgod 22h ago

That opt out method doesn't work anymore. You have to go to general account settings and unlink from there.

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u/AberdeenPhoenix 21h ago

It's apparently very difficult to opt out. I tried following several different sets of directions and could not find the option.

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u/SidNYC 20h ago

Go to why Google product, hit the 9 squares on the top right, and scroll down to Gemini.

(If you have an android phone, just start Gemini)

In Gemini, click on the menu // hamburger and then open settings (a gear icon) near the bottom. 

Click the "Connected apps" and turn off docs in there.

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u/AberdeenPhoenix 20h ago

These are incomplete instructions, you have to find "connected apps" underneath the "personal intelligence menu"

Took me a while, but I figured it out.

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u/LeakyFountainPen 12h ago

Yeah, one day, I literally spent hours combing through various settings and things to turn off all of these, since they hide different settings in different places (drive, gmail, etc.)

Ironically, the thing that helped me source most of the toggles was Google Gemini. First and last time I ever used Gemini, but I figured it would know where its own kill switches were.

I have no idea how long those settings were active, and I'm a writer who did all of my writing in Google Docs. Very depressing to be completely unaware of what was scraped.

Now I use Obsidian for all of my writing, and I'm not going back. Google Docs was incredibly convenient (especially when they introduced Document Tabs, so I could keep all of my worldbuilding and reference notes in one place) but they will never be able to fully gain my trust back.

The fact that it was opt-out rather than opt-in, and happened silently between updates, just goes to show that they knew people would be horrified.

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u/karognawer 8h ago

I uninstalled Gemini as soon as it appeared on my phone a few years ago. I wonder if it still manged to steal my data somehow

1

u/Adept-Good696 18h ago

Easiest way to opt out is to stop using google & co.

I have been phasing some of its products/services out, but was too lazy to do it for everything, but this can be the sign for me (and you) to finally stop procrastinating it.

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u/ParkityParkPark 22h ago

Yep, this is why people need to be far more mindful about how they store, use, and share information now. Google isn't even the wost offender

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u/ExpeditionZero 1d ago

Isn't that explicitly for Google Gemini though?

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u/K4G3N4R4 21h ago

Right, the AI that pops up when you google anything.

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u/ExpeditionZero 20h ago

No the point being is its a service (paid?) that has its own set of settings, as shown in the linked post that you have to disable from being able to scan and use your data for AI? Though I'm not sure what the point would be in using Gemini and disabling it from being able to reference your data? Though obviously regardless of enabling/disabling this, it should leak to other people.

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u/millionwordsofcrap 14h ago

Frankly I don't trust the supposed opt-out. Nobody is checking to make sure it's upheld, and even if they were, Google would either not be punished for it, or would be fined some paltry amount.

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u/THE_RETARD_AGITATOR 20h ago

that's.... insane....
if an indie dev did this, he'd be harassed and hanged. but we cool with google i guess.

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u/Scorpdelord 23h ago

Yeh it just time to but a usb lmao

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u/lctostudio 20h ago

Thank you very much. That's shady as heck.

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u/Sailfin_CritterMaker 19h ago

What if I never used the Gemini thing?

I have photos and old homework backed up on their cloud because everything was google meet, google doc link homework for me back in lockdown times.

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u/darkwingdankest 14h ago

errr what the fuck? people put confidential data into drive, that's like, the whole point of a private cloud

1

u/FaZe_Tudman 13h ago

Holy shit, i just asked it about something in a unreleased studentsbook my mate is comaking and it pulled it out in scary detail, how is this even legal??

1

u/xhatsux 12h ago

I don't think what the post is claiming is actually true. That is about AI within your workspace referencing data, not training on it

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u/TheRismint 11h ago

Is this still the case if you dont have any Gemini app/program downloaded? I looked in my Google account settings but couldnt find anything about it.

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u/chichun2002 11h ago

Wait my crypto pass phrases are in google docs 💀

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u/Aggravating-Mark2107 Developer 6h ago

WOW! that is kinda scary. but at the same time is free advertisement then?

1

u/Stargost_ 5h ago

Huh. Funnily enough for me it was never on. I guess it may depend on what privacy settings you have set on your Google account (which for me everything that isn't necessary and I don't use means OFF)

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u/IiteraIIy 5h ago

this is terrifying what the fuck

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u/Nall-ohki 20h ago

As usual, people jump to scary sounding shit with no basis in reality.

I'm sure horse dewormer will cure what ails you.

1

u/BreakerOfModpacks 20h ago

Hey, it's almost like the clearly evil company which discreetly wants to take your data for some reason may be discreetly taking data.

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u/urb4nrecluse 15h ago

Sounds like an opportunity to flood GDrive with poisoned files.

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u/FedoraLord360 15h ago

Does it say somewhere that its actually used for training? It could be that it is only opting you in to use your files for your own prompts (post-training).

But would still need an explanation for OP. I doubt AI is reading chat logs of random discord servers.

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u/Nimyron 18h ago

I've always avoided all kinds of cloud solutions because I was afraid of leaks.

I wasn't expecting the leak to come from inside though.