Google has been spying on you and nobody told you it was happening.
The tech giant just got hit with a bombshell lawsuit.
And Google just got caught red-handed with one privacy violation that left millions furious.
Google turned on AI spying without asking permission
In October 2025, Google quietly activated its Gemini AI system across Gmail, Google Chat, and Meet for every user — without asking permission, without sending notifications, without giving anyone a choice.¹
One day users had control over whether artificial intelligence could scan their private emails and messages.
The next day that control vanished, buried so deep in privacy settings that even tech experts struggled to find it.
Thomas Thele and Melo Porter had enough of Google's games and filed a class action lawsuit in federal court in San Jose, California.²
The lawsuit exposes what Google was really doing with Gemini after that October flip of the switch.
Google's AI got access to everything you thought was private
According to the complaint, Gemini didn't just skim the surface of users' communications.
Google gave its AI system "access and exploit the entire recorded history of its users' private communications, including literally every email and attachment sent and received."³
That means every personal email about health problems, every message about finances, every private conversation about family matters — all fed into Google's artificial intelligence system without users knowing or consenting.
The lawsuit describes what Gemini could access from a single user: "financial information and records, employment information and records, religious affiliations and activities, political affiliations and activities, medical care and records, the identities of his family, friends, and other contacts, social habits and activities, eating habits, shopping habits, exercise habits."⁴
What makes this particularly galling is how Google set up the illusion of user control.
The company's settings include a line that reads "When you turn this setting on, you agree" — except Gemini had already been switched on automatically.⁵
That's not giving users a choice.
That's creating a deceptive trap where Google gets to harvest private data while pretending users opted in.
The plaintiffs argue this enables Google to "cross-reference and conduct unlimited analysis toward unmerited, improper, and monetizable insights" about users' private relationships and behaviors.⁶
Thele called Google's conduct "deceptive and unethical."⁷
The lawsuit accuses the company of "surreptitiously turned on this AI tracking 'feature' without informing or obtaining the consent" and describes the behavior as "highly offensive to a reasonable person."⁸
FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson just put Google on notice
The Trump administration isn't letting Google slide on these privacy violations.
Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson — a Trump appointee — has been taking aim at Big Tech's abuse of conservative users.
In August, Ferguson fired off a warning letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai about Gmail's spam filters allegedly suppressing Republican fundraising emails.⁹
"Any act or practice inconsistent with these obligations could lead to an FTC investigation and potential enforcement action," Ferguson wrote.¹⁰
Congressional Republicans have been piling on.
Senator Tim Scott and Representative Richard Hudson called on the FTC to investigate Google for allegedly routing conservative emails to spam folders.
"Google's speech suppression practices are detrimental to American democracy and should not be allowed to persist for another election cycle," they wrote.¹¹
This Gemini lawsuit hands Ferguson and congressional Republicans a perfect opening.
Now Google faces accusations that go beyond suppressing conservative emails — they secretly turned on AI surveillance across millions of private accounts.
The plaintiffs charged Google with violating four separate laws: the California Invasion of Privacy Act, the California Computer Data Access and Fraud Act, the Stored Communications Act, and California's constitutional right to privacy.¹²
This isn't Google's first privacy rodeo.
Just two months ago, a federal jury hit Google with a $425.7 million verdict for collecting user data even when people turned off tracking.¹³
Last April, Google agreed to destroy billions of data records after they got busted tracking "Incognito" mode users who thought they were browsing privately.¹⁴
Before that, Texas extracted nearly $1.4 billion from Google for state privacy violations.¹⁵
You see the pattern here.
Google harvests your private information like it's theirs to take. They pay the fines when they get caught. Then they turn around and do it again because the profits dwarf the penalties.
But this time could be different.
Ferguson's FTC has the authority to launch investigations and demand accountability.
Google can't claim this was an accident when they flipped a switch to spy on millions of Americans one month after a jury said they violated privacy laws.
Your private emails about medical problems, your financial records, your conversations about your kids — Google fed all of it into their AI without asking.
That's not a bug in the system.
That's the business model.
And Ferguson's FTC is watching.
¹ "Google Accused in Suit of Using Gemini AI Tool to Snoop on Users," Bloomberg, November 12, 2025.
² Ibid.
³ Ibid.
⁴ "Google Hit with Data Privacy Lawsuit After 'Secretly' Turning On Gemini AI for All Users," ClassAction.org, November 14, 2025.
⁵ Ken Macon, "Lawsuit Claims Google Secretly Used Gemini AI to Scan Private Gmail and Chat Data," Reclaim The Net, November 18, 2025.
⁶ "Google Hit with Data Privacy Lawsuit After 'Secretly' Turning On Gemini AI for All Users," ClassAction.org, November 14, 2025.
⁷ Ken Macon, "Lawsuit Claims Google Secretly Used Gemini AI to Scan Private Gmail and Chat Data," Reclaim The Net, November 18, 2025.
⁸ Ibid.
⁹ "Scoop: FTC chair warns Google not to discriminate against GOP email," Axios, August 28, 2025.
¹⁰ Ibid.
¹¹ "Scoop: NRCC and NRSC call for FTC investigation in Google," Axios, May 22, 2025.
¹² Ken Macon, "Lawsuit Claims Google Secretly Used Gemini AI to Scan Private Gmail and Chat Data," Reclaim The Net, November 18, 2025.
¹³ "Google faces $425M verdict for collecting user data despite privacy controls," Fox Business, September 5, 2025.
¹⁴ "Google to destroy browsing data to settle consumer privacy lawsuit," CNBC, April 1, 2024.
¹⁵ "Google fined $425m in latest data privacy lawsuit," Syrenis, September 11, 2025.
