Google says it respects user privacy in AI, but the reality is not so black and white.
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Google’s privacy maze: How Gemini traps you and your data
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The enshittification and data harvesting will continue until they eventually turn a profit on this product nobody wants.
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Proton, Kagi, and LibreOffice. To name a few. Take back what is yours if and wherever you can folks.
And this is one of the many issues. These settings menus change more frequently than the Windows Control Panel.
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"Many people are hoping—nay, praying—that the potential AI bubble will burst soon. But to hear Google tell it, generative AI is the future"
These two things are not mutually exclusive.
These two things are not mutually exclusive.
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To add a little anecdata: I switched to posteo several years ago and couldn't be happier with it.
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This is why I'm using the bank holiday weekend to finally ditch Gmail altogether.
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Last year when I discovered that disabling Gemini also disabled the actually useful features in the inbox I immediately spent the rest of the week extracting myself from all Google products. I literally can't think of a more intentionally shitty way to force a shitty feature that most don't want.
This is after 20 years of using gmail, paying for gDrive space, YouTube premium, etc. I now selfhost most of what I did with the Google suite and pay Proton for the rest.
Fuck Google.
What a fantastic way to literally run off loyal, paying customers. The decision makers at these companies are malicious, capricious brain dead zombies with paradoxical hubris and divinity complexes.
Fuck them all.
This is after 20 years of using gmail, paying for gDrive space, YouTube premium, etc. I now selfhost most of what I did with the Google suite and pay Proton for the rest.
Fuck Google.
What a fantastic way to literally run off loyal, paying customers. The decision makers at these companies are malicious, capricious brain dead zombies with paradoxical hubris and divinity complexes.
Fuck them all.
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Exactly this. I opted out of Gemini in gmail, was faced with a useless inbox, and promptly sighed and turned it back on. Congratulations, Google, you own my ass. Which means I'm much more motivated to finally start working on that self-hosting and google disentanglement project I've been procrastinating.
Really, the long con on this one is quite impressive. When the tab-autofilter feature was added I thought it was kinda neat, and over time it led me to being much less vigilant about protecting my email address. Good old Google takes care of filtering out the marketing crap for me. It was genuinely useful, and was so for years, with no real strings attached.
Now they have my address of twenty-two years held hostage, willing and able to drown it in a flood of automated shit unless I feed even more of myself into their machine. I don't resent this, not at all.
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ubercurmudgeon
Ars Tribunus Militum
And, if too many people do opt-out, they can always redesign the settings "for your convenience", rewording the defaults slightly, and setting them back the way they want them.
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Google always gives you option to turn something off but they bundle everything together, like with location you used to be able to have location off but still be able to ping your phone with findmyphone if it had network. Now they bundled it so you have either never be able to find your phone if you're looking for it, or keep location with exact fine detailed tracking on 100% of the time. Same with gmail and with their new ai, if you do turn the settings off then it barely works.
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Sounds like we need a guillotine with advanced user consent settings and largely theoretical opt-out. Legally speaking they went voluntarily.
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digitalrelic
Smack-Fu Master, in training
Google has such an insane stranglehold on virtually the entire internet. YouTube in particular. There's literally no one else on the planet that could provide anything remotely comparable to it.
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I put up a permanent auto-reply: "Google sucks. If you're a human you can reach me at me@proton.me" Changed my email address for banking accounts and never looked back. Google can sift through my 21 years of mostly spam to train their shitty LLM.
Honestly getting out of gmail was pretty easy. Ditching Drive, Photos and then Android (GrapheneOS) took more effort but I'm completely out now.
It's hilarious, I was paying and would have continued to pay them for the basic services they offered....but that was apparently was too much to ask.
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Strangely the article's author seems to believe that Google isn't feeding everyone's documents and emails into their AI simply because it says it isn't. This is ludicrously naive, Google has a long history of lying about what it's doing with people's data and has never faced any meaningful consequences for it. Of course they are feeding all your data into their AI, and likely continue to do so even if you try to turn their AI off. Why wouldn't they?
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Microsoft tried and lost interest. They had a YouTube competitor called Soapbox and a search competitor called Bing once upon a time.
People with much deeper understanding of the technical aspects tell me Google is the only one that can afford to maintain something like YouTube. The storage, bandwidth, and data center costs are astronomical.
Apple has the money and could try and create a premium iTube, but they also seem to have lost interest in ads and any kind of functional search in the existing App Store, let alone spinning up something new.
Kick and Rumble are trying to compete using gambling and crypto money but both have plateaued on the growth side.
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Never understood why anyone ever trusted Google with their email in the first place. The only times I've ever had a Google address was for work (because it was a Google shop) and for a website I created (because the free email address was actually Gmail in disguise). I never used either of those for personal email; whether anything important was harvested from the work address, I don't care, because they asked for it by signing their souls to Satan in the first place.
My email is hosted by Migadu, my search engines are Kagi and DDG, and I maintain a burner account for YouTube. No Google apps are on my computer, and that's just fine with me.
My email is hosted by Migadu, my search engines are Kagi and DDG, and I maintain a burner account for YouTube. No Google apps are on my computer, and that's just fine with me.
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SubWoofer2
Ars Tribunus Militum
Weird. I was reading the first two paragraphs, and then - ka-pow!
But the rest of the article went back to the initial google focus. Sterling job, too!
... straight into a foreshadowed pivot about Win 11.
But the rest of the article went back to the initial google focus. Sterling job, too!
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Difference is--you can turn it off. And you can turn it off, and not break everything. The biggest difference, Kagi is not selling you the user and your habits as a product.
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I would be shocked if "opt-out" truly opted people out, and that was respected, rather than merely hide the fact that the data is used for training purposes.
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This is how you pay for the services Google provides. It's always been that way - you give Google some level of access to your data that they can use to sell ads & services, and in return you get get "free" search, email, storage, etc. And the choice is always the same - if you don't like the deal, go elsewhere. Presumably some place where you pay in money instead of data.
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fellow human
Ars Praefectus
I don't know how anyone could have expected any different from the World's largest ad company.
Follow the money. Delete your account.
Follow the money. Delete your account.
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Someone on reddit wrote that even the delete button is not delete in gemini. More like a hide button.
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fellow human
Ars Praefectus
This is disingenuous at best. AI as a technology isn't the issue, privacy is about collection and use of data.
Kagi's privacy privacy speaks for itself.
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This is what Regulations are for. In a functioning democracy there is a body that represents real people (as opposed to fictional people called "corporations") which acts as a counterbalance to corporate interests...
Would be great if the United States of America adopted one!
Would be great if the United States of America adopted one!
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Which will be never, so far.
I became a bit more proactive about what data Google has on me, personally.
I don't expect many people would be doing this, but being in a position where I can, I simply moved all of my Google e-mails to my local folder on my computer then deleted it from Google. Including the "all mail" folder where everything is replicated. It was something like 15000 e-mails since about 2002, very few of them personal.
Anything new coming in now is automatically downloaded to my personal folder and deleted from the Inbox. Spam is just deleted. And once a month I log in and delete the "all mail" folder contents again, then log out again, and empty the cookies. I also have my browser deleting all cookies with a very narrow exception list when I close the window on it. Does that mean I have to log in each time? Yes, yes it does. And that's what I call the cost of privacy.
I'm FINE with that.
Yet, people seem to think they have to have that shit "out there". That's how google and the rest of them built that ecosphere. But back in the day, that wasn't how it was done. Your shit was yours, and when it downloaded, ONLY you had it, if you didn't have the "leave e-mail on server" check box option checked. I considered that a feature of the old POP3 accounts, not a flaw. It seems they don't have those anymore. IMAP fucks you over, if you are a POP3 lover. And Google goes WAY out of its way to make it hard for you to delete your data.
I don't expect most people today to do this. They've been indoctrinated in the ideology that their privacy must be compromised in order to geek on YouTube. I look at it differently.
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Or a favorite they've really been liking lately, "giving you more control over your data and privacy," which has as much semantic validity as Ladapo's push for "freedom... from medical tyranny" next article over.
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I'll be honest, all of the Gmail "smart features" sound like hot garbage too. When I get an email, I do something with it--read it, don't read it, keep it or delete it. It's honestly not that hard. Just don't fall a thousand emails behind and then wave your hands and give up.
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Most of us don't want it, but there's already addicts. I've heard Jon Oliver recently suggest too many people are now "dependent" on it and would be psychologically damaged in some way if they were suddenly cut off. That... is depressing... but I still believe it should happen. Frankly, the damage being risked by that dependence is greater than the damage of being cut off from it. Family members should be available to assist and check in after such date when a lot of these things go dark, but frankly... already a lot of these things are slipping into reinforcement loops of the WORST sort of behavior, from suicide to shootings to pursuing harmful relationships to even advice not to go to real humans for help. All from a statistical word picker that isn't even aware of what it's saying, but the words are GIVEN meaning by the readers, so there it is.
The brief moment of mourning the dependent will have for it can be moved past, and it's yet another example of the harm this horrible era has put us into.
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I love the stories of how AI systems delete entire production databases and backups in seconds because they can. The cost of implementing this stuff before it's ready is already staggering. You have to wonder why these corporate executives are in such a rush to replace people.
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I think the more accurate statement would be that nobody can afford to eat the costs associated with a platform like youtube long enough to ever become as prevalent as youtube. This also assumes that neither google nor alphabet bother the company as it grows which is unlikely. It's just a no-win situation.
Well, as an example, Google currently charges 300$ a month for their highest AI usage tier. A minimum wage employee at 40 hours a week would cost 1160$ a month. Is having shoddy, unreliable work worth an 860$ savings? Corporate executives have said yes so far.
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fellow human
Ars Praefectus
I do this too. I wish browsers would do more to surface cookie behaviour in the UI. IMO they should force cookies to session by default, with a simple click to whitelist for persistent.
PS it's really annoying that Firefox doesn't sync the cookie exception list.
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They've been told it will save them money. If their multinational corporation could be a turnkey operation run by ONE person, they'd do it in a heartbeat.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00npeUY_1Vg
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