Google has updated its privacy policy to allow personal information from Gmail, Google Photos, and Drive to potentially be used for targeted advertising, raising new questions about how the company handles users’ private data.
The change, which took effect on October 16, introduces a significant exception to Google’s previous promise that it would not use content from these services to personalize advertisements.
As first spotted by Android Authority, the updated policy specifically affects users who connect their personal information to Google’s AI-powered services, including Search and Gemini.
Not at all surprising. Microsoft is already doing similar sorts of things it seems. Like on a work system, I was looking at one of our vendor sites, and Edge’s AI assistant started recommending places I could get a cheaper deal for items that I stopped to look at for a bit too long. So not only do you get a shittier slop infested product in Edge, but it’s also pretty much an AI powered adware that watches every page you visit, and you can’t easily get rid of it / its monitoring.
Problem is every institution by default expects you to have gmail. If not then you need to have it. This is what fucked up.
At this point it’s tempting to tell them Google has banned you.
If you want to take back control of your data, there are open source alternatives to almost every Google product
Fucking hell. Time to take all the photos down. It’s been at least a decade since a photo has been uploaded there, because I knew Google can’t be trusted and I disabled the automatic upload, just hadn’t taken the already uploaded images down. On top of that, for months I have been in the process of moving off gmail to Zoho Mail. Fuck Google.
Taking your photos down may not remove them from their dataset. If they really wanted to they could restore them for their dataset. You wouldn’t ever know.
Great, so I’m going to get advertisements of an “adult” nature soon
Those advertisers are constantly subsidizing the evil tech bros. Fuck all products! /s
Original source article:
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-personal-intelligence-privacy-3727111/
Also, fuck off, Pichai. You fucking banchode.
Moving to Ente? Or moving to Proton family? Mixed of both?
I also found out the reported Photos usage via Google profile is way undercounted. It shows i have 30 GB of photos. I just requested a checkout of all Photos and well… i need to download 120GB…
Reminder that Immich has basically all the features of Google Photos and more, and you can migrate fairly easily by doing a Google Takeout.
https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/migrating-google-photos-to-immich-via-takeout
Problem being that even a 4TB NAS costs almost 1000€ to buy or build… It’s painful.
Just looked and yeah, not far off when you buy new. An old PC with a couple of hard drives can do the trick, but obviously it’s more work to set up.
The used and refurb market is your friend.
For large capacity refurb enterprise-grade drives, I recommend serverpartdeals
I’ve had some good 16TB drives from there for a good few years and still kicking. They can be a little loud though. You can get 10TB drives for maybe €250.
A Synology 4-bay NAS can be bought second hand from eBay for about €200-€300. They aren’t very powerful but might be fine for Immich and pretty easy to use. Many come with some hard drives you can pawn off or get started with using a RAID config that means if one or two die you are fine. If the drives are second hand (not pro refurb) though do not pay more than 30% of retail price because who knows how long they will last.
Photos don’t take up that much space. Even 100 000 photos tends to take up less than 500GB. Video is much heavier, so if you’re a videographer you may struggle without reencoding.
and if you can’t selfhost, ente.io is also a good option. but it’s a different software.
❤️ You rock 🫶
I got a year of @Thundermail.com for $72.00.
I use The Flatpak on my Desktop and grabbed it from F-Droid on my Pixel 10.
I don’t even have Google Play Services installed on my daily driver/main profile. 🙃
Is this only some countries? I thought they legally had to email to inform you of changes to these policies where I live b
So glad I switched to immich
Any sane person really still using Gmail?!
What sort of lemmy-ass statement is this? Of course there are sane people using Gmail.
Most people, yeah
I switched to tuta.com since a couple years back, it’s been pretty good. The user experience is worse, but it’s a good trade-off.
But of course it’ll take many years until I’m able to get rid of my Gmail account completely. Especially since I’m using a Google phone, and my car needs a Google account since its OS is based on/integrated with Android. And some websites don’t allow changing your email address, so I dunno what to do about those.
Is there an inbox wrapper I can use for gmail on android?
I know I know just switch to proton or whatever. I have, but sometimes I still get stuff from things I’ve connected to gmail that i I’ve forgotten about.
The gmail app on android is very ad heavy.
Just looking to access my gmail from a cleaner app.
The gmail app on android is very ad heavy.
Is it? Or is that just a US thing? Anyway get adguard, that should help.
Thunderbird
Just set gmail to auto-forward all mail to the address you actually use.
Do you just mean an email client? Then fairmail or thunderbird
Yup thanks
I use Gmail at my workplace. They can go right ahead and use my emails that I check using Thunderbird to send me targeted ads if I ever use their search engine (I use DuckDuckGo).
