People report that their personal contact info was surfaced by Google AI—and there’s apparently no easy way to prevent it. 

A Redditor recently [wrote](https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/1sqja4e/googles_ai_is_doxxing_my_real_phone_number/) that he was “desperate for help”: for about a month, he said, his phone had been inundated by calls from “strangers” who were “looking for a lawyer, a product designer, a locksmith.” Callers were apparently misdirected by Google’s generative AI. 

In March, a software developer in Israel was contacted on WhatsApp after Google’s chatbot Gemini provided incorrect customer service instructions that included his number. 

And in April, a PhD candidate at the University of Washington was messing around on Gemini and got it to cough up her colleague’s personal cell phone number. 

[AI researchers](https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/07/18/1120466/a-major-ai-training-data-set-contains-millions-of-examples-of-personal-data/?utm_source=the_download&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_term=*%7CSUBCLASS%7C*&utm_content=*%7CDATE:m-d-Y%7C*) and [online privacy experts](https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/06/12/1074449/real-ai-risks/) have long [warned](https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/01/28/1131835/what-ai-remembers-about-you-is-privacys-next-frontier/?utm_campaign=site_visitor.unpaid.engagement&utm_source=LinkedIn&utm_medium=tr_social) of the [myriad dangers](https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/04/21/1135919/ai-surveillance-privacy-llms-bulk-data/) generative AI poses for personal privacy. These cases give us yet another scenario to worry about: generative AI exposing people’s real phone numbers. (The Redditor did not respond to multiple requests for comment and we could not independently verify his story.)

AI chatbots are giving out people’s real phone numbers