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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I do have a Google-account, but I haven't really used my Gmail for anything in a long time, I don't use Drive at all, I don't use Photos and so on. I really only use Gemini and YouTube and I'm not paying for either of those. Gemini I really only use occasionally to look up something that is hard-to-impossible to find with Search or at least where to look for that.
I also have already a long time ago disabled almost every tracking and smart feature and I don't sync my contacts or calendars to Google's services, either. I don't understand why I'd e.g. need some "smart" features for my email: if I get an email, I read it and move on. I self-host Photos-, Drive-, Contacts, Calendar and so on alternatives myself.
I could totally ditch Gemini fully as well if needed, so the only thing I'm dependent on is YouTube.
I also have already a long time ago disabled almost every tracking and smart feature and I don't sync my contacts or calendars to Google's services, either. I don't understand why I'd e.g. need some "smart" features for my email: if I get an email, I read it and move on. I self-host Photos-, Drive-, Contacts, Calendar and so on alternatives myself.
I could totally ditch Gemini fully as well if needed, so the only thing I'm dependent on is YouTube.
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Actually useful, or "It'll squirt out some slop so I can say it was done, but no one will ever look at it," useful?
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From the Article:
If the only way to opt out of AI training is to permanently disable your chat history, that arrangement doesn’t seem to respect the user’s agency—it’s a forced action. Even finding the right menu to opt out of training can be a chore.
Will an executive go to jail if this is found to be a lie? Will the financial penalty for violating this be so ruinous and extend to the executives personally as to be an actual deterrence or it is just the cost of doing business.
Google will just "anonymize" your data for training purposes. It will still be used. I dont care what lies they tell us.
Until we have data privacy rights enshrined in law with severe penalties for violations we are supposed to believe known liars?
If the only way to opt out of AI training is to permanently disable your chat history, that arrangement doesn’t seem to respect the user’s agency—it’s a forced action. Even finding the right menu to opt out of training can be a chore.
Will an executive go to jail if this is found to be a lie? Will the financial penalty for violating this be so ruinous and extend to the executives personally as to be an actual deterrence or it is just the cost of doing business.
Google will just "anonymize" your data for training purposes. It will still be used. I dont care what lies they tell us.
Until we have data privacy rights enshrined in law with severe penalties for violations we are supposed to believe known liars?
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It'd be better if there wasn't a "new youtube". It'd become the old youtube all too quickly. Instead, implementing video storage into existing federated systems would be the way forward. No one site, no one company, just numerous interconnected sites that all host their own videos, under their own rules. Like it was before Youtube, but with the ease of search we've come to expect from Youtube.
The monetization, of course, will need to move on to other things... but many channels are already needing to find outside means to be profitable already, so that's barely a loss.
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I don't know if something has changed, but I went into gmail settings and turned off the two workspace smart features only. I left the box checked for "Turn on smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet".
The inbox with tabs remains, but the AI summaries on emails went away.
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An observation: While it's popular around here to say that these are features no one wants, in the world of people I know/work with/interact with, there is only one person who is an outspoken advocate against any form of AI. Every other person ranges from cautious to booster. Most sit somewhere in the "I find it useful" camp.
I say that only in that the market seems to be asking for these features. Alphabet's earnings yesterday were up and attributed to positive growth in AI usage. (That could be because people are using it unintentionally as it's embedded everywhere, but it wasn't clear from what I read.)
So, yeah, I believe they are chasing this because the market wants it. You may disagree with the market and I completely back folks who say that AI is making folks lazy and dumber. As a business though, one should follow this trend simply because customers expect it. No one wants to shed customers in this economy because you lack what is now considered table stakes.
I say that only in that the market seems to be asking for these features. Alphabet's earnings yesterday were up and attributed to positive growth in AI usage. (That could be because people are using it unintentionally as it's embedded everywhere, but it wasn't clear from what I read.)
So, yeah, I believe they are chasing this because the market wants it. You may disagree with the market and I completely back folks who say that AI is making folks lazy and dumber. As a business though, one should follow this trend simply because customers expect it. No one wants to shed customers in this economy because you lack what is now considered table stakes.
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I rely on Microsoft Outlook for personal e-mail, and have ever since an incident took place when I was a new Android developer, and when that platform itself was relatively new. Google incorrectly claimed the apps I had created in the then-named Android Market (today's Play Store) had violated some arcane requirement and delisted all of them suddenly, without explanation. I contacted them through Gmail (of course) to complain, to no avail.
After I wrote both the FTC and the California AG's office to hopefully put Google in hot water, my apps were suddenly relisted, without explanation or apology. But all traces of my complaint messages to Google in Gmail mysteriously vanished.
That was the last time I trusted Gmail for regular use.
After I wrote both the FTC and the California AG's office to hopefully put Google in hot water, my apps were suddenly relisted, without explanation or apology. But all traces of my complaint messages to Google in Gmail mysteriously vanished.
That was the last time I trusted Gmail for regular use.
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For any video provider--storage is a scaling problem. But it is one of many, hosting streaming video at scale you need efficient data routing worldwide and it gets problematic quick. Luke over at Floatplane has talked a bunch regarding the issues of even running a relatively "small" streaming company with tens of thousands of users serving gigabytes of video daily.
There's FP, there's Nebula, there are some others. Honestly the only thing I can't get elsewhere at the moment is How Money Works and Spiffing Brit, otherwise I'd kick YT to the curb.
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A harmless pie
Ars Centurion
I didn't go that far, I just turned it off and learned a fully new way to live. I would have a devil of a time replacing youtube. Despite all the trash on the platform, there's a ton of useful info for my line of work, though with the gentle collapse of the game/commercial industries, that stuff is becoming less useful for me in particular.
But the way gmail changed felt like a fucking punishment, if you'll pardon the language. It felt like google was mad at me for not wanting their stupid "AI" crap in my email. I don't know, maybe it's time to leave, possibly get into landscaping or demolitions with a new email address.
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I'm suggesting a solution that sidesteps all of that. If it's a protocol, not a fixed service, hosting costs are only an issue for your OWN content, on YOUR federated instance. In the same way you only need to worry about the costs for hosting YOUR web site, in a federated instance model, your video content is only your own concern, scaling upwards with viewership more than anything else.
Cinnemassacre didn't need to worry about thatguy's hosting costs. They were two separate web sites, run by two separate companies. This is the model I'm proposing. Youtube costs an insane amount for ALL of it's content, so break it up!
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Counter-anecdata: I only know one person who uses AI. Everyone else I know is quietly seething with frustration at the fungus-like intrusion of 'AI' into every product and service.
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A harmless pie
Ars Centurion
"The market" needs "AI" to succeed because a terrifying amount of money is tied up in "AI". Anecdotes are not data. My entire social and professional circles are unequivocally anti-AI. We don't want it in anything we use and we don't want to integrate it into any of our workflows. We were better off before any of this "AI" nonsense.
"They" are chasing it because they have to. They have to convince everyone that it is what they said it was. But it isn't and it never will be, even if a generally unaware public believes the lie.
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Which decentralizing can work...but you end up with a worse quality of service overall. It is great for micro-blogging like Mastodon and the like which are extremely data-light--but less so for video streaming.
YT and others operate as well as they do--because they have mirrors everywhere with maniacally efficient data routing that YT is paying for. The problem with decentralizing it--is that you end up with very few people with good service because basically no one has good data routing worldwide. But the advantage is that it isn't a monopoly and it is more resilient; which is a tradeoff most non Ars readers probably wouldn't make.
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All of this is true, save for one thing. I think once people find out they can only GET the videos they are looking for on the decentralized sites, that's where they're going to go. I for one don't even have a 4K monitor at every single location, much less have need to actually stream at that. For what I'm watching, 720p is good enough to not notice the pixels. I'm watching someone wax philosophical on the first 30 seconds of a video game (stretched into 2 hours), not watching a full movie with whizbang special effects. Heck, most cat videos worth watching were uploaded at 480p. We're not really dealing with a heavy quality requirement. I know Youtube wants to do some automatic AI upscaling of all their old content for a "unified look", but people do seem to be rejecting that, not least because even Youtube's massive network advantages aren't helping too much to speed something like THAT up at scale.
Local internet reliability has improved dramatically since Youtube first set up shop, and even THEN I found it rather straightforward to stream stuff from other sites before monetization issues forced them all to move over to Youtube. It's not a trivial issue, but I think it'll be easier to get decent enough quality for most these days. But, for a lot of content now? There's... just not really going to be much of a choice. Youtube seems intent to toss out all the long form content analyzing and deconstructing hate "as if" they are no different than the people SPREADING the hate in the first place. There's all kinds of nightmare hosting issues. While I'm not sure we're at a point where the live streamers could reliably count on a decentralized service, I'm fairly confident we've reached a point where static non-live videos can work.
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I am often deliberately, and sometimes by accident, avoiding most of what this article talks about. I have a Pixel 7a phone, but have it set to use the Google Assistant rather than Gemini — and I don't use the Google Assistant either. I subscribe to YouTube Premium to avoid all the ads for myself and my family, but we have the search and viewing histories turned off. I do not save any Google search history on any devices. I have a Gmail account, but access it through Outlook on my phone or Thunderbird on my computers. I've never, ever used the native Gmail app because I thought the automation is brought to e-mail was intrusive when it was introduced decades ago. I have never had a chat with an AI bot (excepting when I'm forced to for customer service, and those are rare), so I don't have any AI chats to lose if I turn something off. I use duck-duck-go, etc.
In other words, I (and my family) have made deliberate choices to opt out of any services that purport to make things easier for us, but at the cost of privacy. Even then, it is an up hill battle.
But the thing is, I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. Reading this article, it seems that some form of AI workflow is essential to a lot of people, and I'm having trouble understanding that perspective, although I recognize that it's a valid perspective. As a lot of people on this board point out, it seems that many (most?) of the AI features that are touted as being wonderful are actually solutions in search of problems or only modest workflow improvements.
In other words, I (and my family) have made deliberate choices to opt out of any services that purport to make things easier for us, but at the cost of privacy. Even then, it is an up hill battle.
But the thing is, I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. Reading this article, it seems that some form of AI workflow is essential to a lot of people, and I'm having trouble understanding that perspective, although I recognize that it's a valid perspective. As a lot of people on this board point out, it seems that many (most?) of the AI features that are touted as being wonderful are actually solutions in search of problems or only modest workflow improvements.
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YouTube is the only Google product I regularly use (and pay for) by choice.
Ars email is run through gmail, so I'm forced to use it for work, though I mostly treat it like IMAP through a client and avoid everything else about it as best I can.
I've switched my search primarily to Kagi.
But man, so much content I want in my life is on YouTube. There isn't another option, not really. Sure, a handful of people are on Nebula or whatever, but that's mostly the bigger channels that are acting more like produced shows. And that's cool. The more indie and niche content creators aren't there though, and that's my real jam.
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The issue is two-fold for a YouTube competitor:
1 - Users need to actually use it. Content creators need to make content for it.
2 - Who's gonna be willing to pay to help keep it up? For the first time in its life, YouTube finally made a profit a quarter or two ago. Video streaming sites are a notorious money sink.
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I liked Proton until they billed for a VPN renewal I didn't want and getting it canceled was the most time consuming and irritating of any of the several providers I've tried.
In addition, their VPN pricing follows dark patterns (somewhat) because what price you see depends on which link you click and whether or not you are logged in (even as a brand new user. Renewals are different).
Gotta watch out for this crap everywhere.
edit: Not saying don't use them, just watch carefully.
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Google certainly did. Notably, we keep calling them Google, even though they went through all that effort to make Alphabet. Something about any time a company makes another company above them feels sketchy to me... like a sort of shell company situation in reverse.
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MilanKraft
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
100% agreed. And for many folks, if they need an online office suite, Proton is a great way to go. They've now got equivalents of Gemini, Gmail, Drive, Word, Excel, collaborative chat / video, update them fairly often, and all are fully encrypted and fully in your control.
Also this line...
"A toggle that is so vital to user privacy, even one that substantially degrades the experience, should not be so hard to find"
... is the most Google thing ever, and 100% predictable at the outset of the LLM shit-show.
As always "we respect and honor your privacy.... but you'll have to burrow 5 layers deep into a completely inscrutable combination of settings to enable actual control and privacy over some part of our glorious suite.
Fuck Google indeed. Sideways with a chainsaw. And Meta. And OpenAI. I'd say xAI too but no serious person — even in this clown show — uses Grok the suicide enabler and kiddie porn bot for anything important. Might as well just start calling it "MAGA-bot".
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sigh
Google doesn’t care about the few people who pay them a few pennies—they’re too busy making millions off the millions who don’t realize that if you’re not paying, you are the product.
The number of ARS peeps, former Google loyalists, who still don’t get this is staggering. Remember, Google literally removed its startup motto, DO NO EVIL. So why anyone acts surprised by anything Google does now is beyond me.
But thanks to Reaganomics, prison turned to profits
'Cause free labor's the cornerstone of US economics
'Cause slavery was abolished, unless you are in prison
You think I am, then read the 13th Amendment
Involuntary servitude and slavery it prohibits
That's why they givin' offenders time in double digits
-Michael Santiago Render
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Tell me how allowing Gemini to train on your data has resulted in a negative impact to your self?
It's healthy to be wary but I need to be convinced there's a reason to fear it to the point where the risks outweigh the benefits before I start turning it all off.
It's healthy to be wary but I need to be convinced there's a reason to fear it to the point where the risks outweigh the benefits before I start turning it all off.
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A harmless pie
Ars Centurion
Because your private data goes into a publicly accessible tool. It's possible to extract said data with the right tools and techniques.
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Hmm, this feels more like something you believe rather than something you have an understanding of. If you could enlighten me about these tools and techniques and how they've been used to cause harm that would be super helpful to me.
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Google's respect is marketing. If they truly respected your privacy, their business model would evaporate.
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As a paid user it’s very very annoying that there’s no option to fully use Gemini while just opting out of it using your data and sessions for training.
You’d think that paying for something would remove the “you are the product” aspect.
You’d think that paying for something would remove the “you are the product” aspect.
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Sadly deleting your account won’t have as much of an effect as you would like. Google analytics is embedded into so many websites, and Google SDKs are used by large percentage of Apps, and now Google car is being embedded into vehicles.
Is like herd immunity but in reverse. If everything around you is being monitored, then good luck escaping.
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Because there has been nothing genuinely new in the field in 20 years and they're racing to exploit the competitive advantage, if there is one. It's like the early days of personal computing. Everybody said "we've got to get into these computers" without really having a reason why. NCR had one. So did AT&T. And DEC. And ITT. And Texas Instruments. Xerox could have had one that beat them all but the suits didn't understand what was happening at PARC. Steve Jobs did, so he stole it.
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That's a blatant lie, as the goal is to sell more expensive ads!
Anyway, just deleted the media files I had backed up in Drive for good measure!
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lol, after decades of them reading your emails to serve ads... now is the time!
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The thing with downloading your emails and deleting from the server is that it doesn't stop Google scanning your emails as soon as they come in and that's a big problem.
If you think about every time you book a train ticket, a plane ticket, a holiday, order food/drinks at a pub using their app.. these all generate a transactional email and that's perfect for Google to monetize.
Now they can target you with ads for companies offering services in your holiday destination, similar pubs, airlines etc.
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The shoddy unreliable work comes from minimum wage employees, who by definition are less educated and low agency. If not, they would not be minimum wage (excepting very young entry level workers).
For the price of these frontier models, the value is astronomical, especially if you take the time to learn how to leverage them.
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A harmless pie
Ars Centurion
I'll happily agree I don't know shit about shit. I know how to type words into google though:
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I need to finish getting away from Google. I stopped using some of their apps/services, like the Docs suite; but I still pay for YouTube Premium (i'm with Aurich, on why I stay there), and I still rely way too much on my Gmail. (FWIW, I at least only access Gmail through IMAP, not the web UI.)
Having owned an iPhone since 2023, i've started leaning more into Apple's equivalent services - which, I know, isn't great, because Apple isn't completely trustworthy either. but my partners and I share an iCloud+ account with 200 GB of storage for photos, email, phone backups, etc. and I rely on iCloud Photos more than I should; but I think it would be fine if I leaned more into using iCloud for email, especially since Proton is a bit pricey for our needs (and doesn't support IMAP without a helper extension).
I don't care for all of the generative AI stuff, of course, but Apple has at least been less aggressive with it, seemingly. And my current iPhone, a 13 Pro Max, has largely been passed over for all the more "involved" AI features, which I've welcomed, but which also may have altered my perception on Apple's adoption of AI garbage.
I'm curious what other Arsians think about relying on the fruit company for all the stuff I once trusted Google for.
Having owned an iPhone since 2023, i've started leaning more into Apple's equivalent services - which, I know, isn't great, because Apple isn't completely trustworthy either. but my partners and I share an iCloud+ account with 200 GB of storage for photos, email, phone backups, etc. and I rely on iCloud Photos more than I should; but I think it would be fine if I leaned more into using iCloud for email, especially since Proton is a bit pricey for our needs (and doesn't support IMAP without a helper extension).
I don't care for all of the generative AI stuff, of course, but Apple has at least been less aggressive with it, seemingly. And my current iPhone, a 13 Pro Max, has largely been passed over for all the more "involved" AI features, which I've welcomed, but which also may have altered my perception on Apple's adoption of AI garbage.
I'm curious what other Arsians think about relying on the fruit company for all the stuff I once trusted Google for.
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Can you get Gemini to walk you through all the places you need to click to disable Gemini ?
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Most of these entries cite research done on GPT2 six years ago and none of it has anything to do with Gemini. This is akin to refusing to drive a 2026 Lexus LX 700 because there was a recall on 2020 Nissan Versa brakes.
I'm not saying Gemini is necessarily proven to be privacy-safe, but until I see evidence to the contrary I will continue to leverage it for productivity with my eyes wide open.
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When Google launched Gmail they were a very different company. They still had "Don't be evil" as an official policy and they hadn't done much to make people distrust them yet. And Gmail was amazing for the time period. A huge quota when all the other free email providers only gave a tiny one. Spam filtering that worked better than any of those other providers as well. (This is still true for the most part.)
Demand to get an invite was insanely high. Once you had one and got invites of your own you could check out sites and see what people were offering for one. I remember giving invites to some people offering nice photos of Japan. People would offer just about anything legal to get an invite.
It's also been very stable and solid. It's the only email address I've managed to keep long term. Hell, Comcast gave my email address away to a new customer. I'd had it over a decade at that point and still used it for a few things. They reassigned it anyway and support was completely useless. I never got it back. I never even got them to understand, or at least admit, that they'd done it. Even with Google's shiftiness nowadays I trust them over Comcast.
At this point they already have more data on me than anyone else, so continuing to use them isn't a big deal. I don't recommend them to new people, though.
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