Google’s new ‘Information Agents’ are a privacy and web infrastructure problem
Google’s new ‘Information Agents’ are a privacy and web infrastructure problem
Publish Date: 2026-05-21 22:45:00
Source Domain: www.thehindu.com
At its annual developer conference a few days ago, Google unveiled something called information agents, a feature that will be built into Search to monitors the web on your behalf. This bots feature will continuously scavenge the web for updates you’ve told it to watch for. It sounds genuinely useful, and it probably is. But it also raises serious questions around user privacy, web traffic and concentration of data on one platform.
For starters, this type of an agentic feature works best when the user gives the agent a lot of details about themselves. To monitor housing listings on your behalf, it needs your location preferences, budget, family size, commute constraints, and timeline. If you want it to plan your travel and stay during a vacation, you will end up sharing your personal and financial details with the bot.
The simple rule with these agents is that the more you tell it, the better it works. That means Google will be able to build a more intimate profile about you.
The company already sits across your search history, Gmail, Calendar, Maps, Chrome, YouTube, and Android. Information agents are designed to sit at the intersection of all of those applications, connecting them in a way that’s different from what any single Google product does today.
Data and privacy
In that process of connecting multiple applications, these agents will pick several bits of data from the user, which in turn can be used as feed for the massive ad tech industry.
A prompt to an agent for a specific type of house in a particular area will include details about financial position and location details. And this information will very likely be stored indefinitely.
In terms of what people ask AI agents, we have only scratched the surface. As more use cases emerge, people may end up sharing a lot more sensitive, personally identifiable data like religious and political views, sexual orientation, medical history, and financial behaviour.
At this point, it is unclear how Google plans to…
