Google’s Gemini Nano Banana and the Cost of Convenience

Google’s new Gemini Nano Banana AI image editor and photo editor has pushed conversations about privacy and security back into the spotlight.  The tool, which allows users to easily generate or edit images, placing themselves alongside celebrities or altering facial features, has rekindled debates around biometric data, user consent, and surveillance capitalism. While Google maintains that its models are not trained on personal photos, experts point out that the underlying technology may still be used for behavioural tracking, facial recognition, and metadata analysis. Consent Gaps and Normalised Surveillance at Scale Eamonn Maguire, director of engineering, AI & ML at Proton, in an interaction with AIM, described Nano Banana as “a troubling expansion of surveillan