Google’s new daily helper knows all about you. Just how creepy is it?

Google is trying to make Gemini as ubiquitous as possible. From AI Mode in Search to Gemini Intelligence in Android, and even the Gemini app on iPhone, the company is betting big that you’ll encounter its AI bot somewhere on your devices and fall so in love that you can’t live without it. One of these new features is Daily Brief, a digital corkboard that scans through all of your Google services to write a custom agenda for the day that is as cool as it is creepy. But is it useful? Let’s take a look.What is Daily Brief?Every morning, I wake up to a new Gemini notification on my Pixel phone waiting to be unraveled. The Daily Brief is an automatically generated itinerary for the day ahead. It can include just about anything — a reminder about an important event you have coming up next week, a nudge to talk to your boss about that email you sent before you clocked out the day before, maybe even a prompt to follow up on that question you Googled earlier in the week.You are giving Gemini permission to scour your Google account, and it will find a lot.Google calls it “your personalized overview of today’s priorities.”That’s not exactly true. We’ll get to why in a bit. The important part for now is that Daily Brief is a constantly evolving to-do list that changes based on your activity in Google’s apps and services.What makes Daily Brief creepyFor Daily Brief to work, it needs complete access to your Google account through Gemini’s Personal Intelligence feature. Once enabled, Gemini can look through the entire treasure trove of information saved in your Google apps and services and use all of it in its responses to your queries.Before you panic over privacy, Google claims that it “built Personal Intelligence with privacy at the center.” Take that with whatever heaping mountain of salt you like. As for me, Google already knows more than enough, thanks to my dependence on its services, and it turns out that Google knows quite a bit.I was a bit stunned when my first Daily Brief showed up in my notification shade. At the time, I was writing my article about prediction markets with Stu Burguiere. Daily Brief knew that, because it saw the article saved in my Google Docs and it spotted the ongoing email chain with Stu to lock in his responses to my questions. It reminded me that I still needed to gather his answers before I could submit the piece to my editor.Cool, right? I thought it was pretty neat at first, and then I realized what it meant — that Gemini knew everything I was doing in Google’s ecosystem and could serve it back to me, even when I least expected the results.RELATED: Google is about to overhaul the Android. You’ll either love it or hate it. lixu/Getty Images This went on for a few more days. It reminded me about pending emails with my editors that still needed responses. It looked at my Chrome browser history and urged me to dig deeper on another set of stories I was researching for Blaze Media. It even recalled from a previous Gemini chat that I write for a living and suggested stories to add to my writing portfolio saved in Google Drive.With Daily Brief, I was suddenly more knowledgeable, more astute, more capable — or at least I appeared that way, as Gemini pinged me reminders for things that were postponed or had completely fallen off my radar.It knew everything about me. Too much, in fact. But I suppose that level of insight is what you get when you give Google a front-row seat to your digital life.Cool? Yes. Creepy? Double yes.Is it useful?For the first couple of days, Daily Brief was useful. I’m not sure it was ever a necessity, but on a few mornings, I woke up intrigued to find what it had in store for the day. Some agenda items were spot-on, like the reminders to follow up on my emails and articles. Eventually, though, Daily Brief started to slip, especially when it came to tasks that it couldn’t see.For instance, I write my stories in Google Docs, but I submit most of them to my editor through a third-party messaging service. In a week, Daily Brief had no idea which stories I was working on or what was still pending approval, despite the fact that my Google Docs are all dated and have activity history that shows when they’re finished or not. It didn’t prompt me for updates on these at all, because it didn’t know when I sent them off for editing. The brief would have been different if I emailed my drafts, but that’s simply not my workflow, so no briefs for me.Just like that, Daily Brief went from creepily useful to oddly empty. All that remained were notes telling me to research article topics that were now outdated because those articles were already in my editor’s hands.Then the following week, Daily Brief did something useful again, reminding me about a paint recycling event coming up next week that I completely forgot about. (I really do need to get those old paint cans out of my storage closet.)So to answer definitively if Daily Brief is useful, I can only say “sometimes.” If you actively participate in Google’s digital ecosystem, it can be extremely helpful. If you use Google services sparingly or not at all, however, Daily Brief will be completely useless. Your mileage depends entirely on how much you rely on Google.Try Daily Brief if you dare!If you’re interested in seeing how useful Daily Brief is all for yourself, you can test it out now. Daily Brief is already available to the public, and it lives directly inside the Gemini app and webpage, so you can access it on Android devices, iPhone, iPad, Mac, and PCs. Screenshots by Zach Laidlaw/Google Gemini appTo enable it, you’ll need to activate Personal Intelligence in the Gemini app or webpage by clicking on the Settings icon, then Personal Intelligence, and switch the toggles beside “Memory” and “Daily Brief” to the on position. Note that by doing this, you are giving Gemini permission to scour your Google account for any bit of information that it finds useful, and it will find a lot.