Google Set Gemini to Read All Your Workspace Files by Default. Turning It Off Takes an Admin.

Google's Gemini assistant is wired into every corner of Workspace, Gmail, Docs, Drive, Calendar, Chat, and Meet, and it pulls from all of it by default. According to ZDNET's David Gewirtz, that setting is on the moment a company turns on Workspace's AI features. Nobody has to flip a switch to enable it. Someone has to go find the switch to turn it off.

Gewirtz, who has used Gmail as what he calls his primary life dashboard for over a decade, says he's generally fine with Google's AI knowing what's in his inbox and documents. He's used that capability to his advantage. But he also flags the obvious: not every professional wants their employer's Gemini license reading everything in their Workspace account, and most people using Workspace at a company have no idea this default exists.

According to ZDNET's reporting, when someone types a prompt into Gemini, the system runs real-time retrieval-augmented generation, meaning it searches indexed Workspace content the same way Google Search has always indexed the web, then pulls relevant material into its answer. It's not building a separate AI training database from your files, and it's not new machine-learning models being trained on your emails behind your back.

Google told ZDNET the data stays inside the company's own domain. It isn't used to train Gemini's underlying models, isn't shared with other organizations or users, and doesn't get exported into some separate AI repository. This is a corporate policy and access-control problem, not a regulatory fire. Still, the default-on setup means individual employees have zero say. Only a Workspace administrator can turn off Gemini's default access to these sources, which puts the decision entirely in IT's hands, not the person actually writing the emails.

Google's argument, implicit in how the feature is built, is straightforward: people want an AI assistant that actually knows their calendar, their drafts, their last three emails on a project. An assistant that can't see any of that is nearly useless. Cordoning off every data source by default would make Gemini a much weaker product on day one, and companies paying for Workspace's AI tier are paying specifically for that integration.

The fair counter-concern is that "opt-out by default" is a familiar pattern with tech companies, and it puts the burden on users and administrators to notice a setting exists at all, rather than requiring an affirmative choice to turn AI loose on sensitive company data. For law firms, healthcare providers, or any business handling confidential client information, an unexamined default is a real risk, even if Google isn't misusing the data today.

That risk got a concrete price tag this month. Google agreed to pay $10 million for Spirit Airlines' internal data as part of the carrier's bankruptcy proceedings, according to a court filing dated August 14 reported by Business Insider. The package includes internal documents, workflows, emails, roughly 500 million Teams messages, and Spirit's codebase. Google says it excludes customer data and has been anonymized.

Spirit stopped flying in May after going bankrupt, according to Business Insider, and employed about 9,700 full-time workers in 2025, according to its most recent annual report. None of those employees had any say in whether their internal chats and workflow documents got sold off as a training asset once the company folded.

Business Insider spoke with employment attorneys about what this means for workers generally. Jared Pope, an employment attorney and CEO of Work Shield, said companies are increasingly getting inbound calls from buyers wanting access to workplace data, because it's valuable training material for AI systems handling things like customer service or code debugging. He said it's worth asking about data-retention policies both when starting a job and when leaving one.

George Socha, an attorney and senior vice president of brand awareness at AI e-discovery platform Reveal, told Business Insider there's no single standard for how companies disclose data and AI policies to employees. He said companies "ought to be trying to establish appropriate, reasonable boundaries and then conveying them clearly to employees." Until that becomes standard practice, Socha's assessment is that it's largely a free-for-all.

Separately, AI training startup Micro1 has offered fifty midsize companies between $100,000 and $2 million for access to their anonymized workplace data, according to Business Insider, underscoring that Spirit's sale isn't an isolated case but part of a growing market.

For Workspace administrators, the immediate action item is checking whether Gemini's default access to company Gmail, Docs, and Chat data matches what the organization actually wants, since that setting exists today and requires manual action to change. For everyone else, the Spirit Airlines sale raises a question with no settled answer yet: when your employer goes under, who decides what happens to the years of emails and messages you left behind, and does anyone tell you before it's sold.