I wouldn’t be surprised if Alphabet has used data from all these sources all the time.
That’s actually the reason I don’t use gmail except for registering Android, or use google calender, or google search except occasionally. I have my youtube account separate from my Android, and I don’t allow any cloud services, like photo or any other storage or sync services.
The power Google can gain from using these things in combination is huge, just like Facebook influenced the 2016 US presidential election, Google/Alphabet could use this for both political and financial gains to an enormous degree, that would have been completely unheard of prior to Internet becoming widely used.
They explicitly stated that they do not.
They have a lot of rules around data control and privacy that are followed internally because the engineers care to toe the line of public statements.
I hate to burst your bubble, but Google lies.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/google-pay-155-million-settlements-over-location-tracking-2023-09-15/
Wait wait wait
You’re telling me multinational mega-corporations lie? That can’t be right.
For the last three decades, tech companies have been operating in a “Ask for forgiveness, not permission” mentality.
Microsoft didn’t get such a large monopoly by playing fair. Neither did Google, Amazon, Uber, etc.
They have always said one thing, the courts found it to be inaccurate, and then they go “Oops” and pay $500 million “cost of doing business” while making 1000+ billion.
Man I can’t wait to get 100% out of gmail.
Just curious- what exactly do you mean by that? Do you mean abandoning/trashing your google account, or do you mean also refusing to send email to gmail recipients?
Personally I’ve gone all the way. Ditching the Google acct was just the 1st step (which implies also ditching Google Playstore). Then I quit sending email to gmail & outlook recipients. Then I went further and do an MX lookup on all email addresses to verify whether a vanity address like bob@lastname.com resolves to google. This has made #email mostly dead to me.
I’m wondering what was the email usage like in the first place if you can just choose to stop sending to most people.
But to be honest, I’ve only sent handful of emails from my personal account within the same number of years.
Can’t wait for bard to join the google graveyard with stadia once the ai fad passes!
If it passes.
I hope it passes.
Why? I think it’s amazing. I fiddle with text-to-image and LLMs daily (running locally of course) and I find them to be very interesting.
I don’t mean that…I mean how pretty much every product nowadays has some sort of new “groundbreaking AI features”. AI’s got tons of practical applications, but companies are really overblowing the whole thing.
It’s already starting to, the AI groups of devs basically showed off an alpha to their CEOs, then those CEOs thought it’s game changing…while the devs were like “no it’s an alpha/pre-alpha and is really dumb”…but the CEOs rolled with it and are now finding how bad it is…so it’s been getting slowly dropped. It’s %100 a fad and has limited applications. It’s really cool tech and I have used it, but it’s not something that’s going to replace many people.
This is only true for generative and sumariziation systems that are directly consumer facing. Current AI systems have a myriad of applications for internal tooling and B2b type systems. At my work we’ve built a vast array of tools using all kinds of modern AI that have delighted our clients. Things that previously wouldn’t have been possible for the average small buisness like filling out patient information by voice.
People like to shit on AI because they think of the thing google search uses or ChatGPT but it really is changing the world just not all at once. There will be more consumer facing advencments but more than likely these will come in the forms of things like existing products that get augmented in some way to aid usability (AI tooling is fantastic at facilitating accessibility).
AI is never going away it is here to stay and it is continuing to grow and advance
Agreed. My lead at work wanted us to start trying/using Cursor.so (VS Code fork with AI as a builtin feature) and it’s been pretty transformative. I don’t see a lot of “hey write me a program that does x” but in my (limited) use of this, a simple “why doesn’t this function work” has been pretty amazing.
I have a feeling this is a branding issue more than anything. When you could ask google plain language questions a decade ago and get responses, that seemed amazing. This to me seems like that but more advanced and I just hope they sort out the truthiness and privacy implications. On the one hand, I want the tech to advance, on the other, I would like it to not be such a privacy nightmare.
I mean who doesn’t like a search engine that very convincingly and assertively lies to you? They all come off as very authoritative while also being so very wrong more often than not.
I mean current search engines are not much better with the drivel they provide
If you choose to use the Workspace extensions, your content from Gmail, Docs, and Drive is not seen by human reviewers, used by Bard to show you ads, or used to train the Bard model.
Yeah… really comforting, Google. Really comforting.
I mean… what else could they offer to make it more comforting?
Idk why you’re being downvoted. You’re completely right
Google is literally evil and everyone who works there wants to kick puppies seems to be the prevailing sentiment here.
Which isn’t true but people really like to pretend the world is black and white instead of infinitely nuanced shades of gray.
Me, who’s had a Gmail account as my main email for twenty plus years. 😞
I’ve been meaning to switch off of Google for months now, but never had the time to properly research what exactly that entails
I was primarily using Gmail and Youtube Music and the switch was fairly easy. Apple Music was a better replacement than the other competitors, and Proton Mail was super easy. Paying for both makes me “not the product, but an actual customer”. Forwarded Gmail to Proton in about 30 seconds, and replaced Chrome with Firefox. Duck Duck Go isn’t a “perfect” replacement for Google Search, but it’s good enough.
Proton looks pretty good, but all the paid Google services show that paying is not enough to be seen as “not the product, but an actual customer” these days.
Proton itself has no access to the encrypted content of your email. Also, they are not an ad company, so their product isn’t you.
It’s NOT a valid reason not to switch, but god that’s a dumb name for a product. Again, I don’t understand why I hate the name, but I do. Please help me.
Proton or DDG? For Proton, I use a custom domain for my email, so that was moot. DDG could have a better name, for sure.
Yepp, thought about DDG. Proton is a bit weird too, but I have my own domain as well, so that’s not an issue.
Good luck on your journey away from Google, it’s worth the effort.
What name are you referring to?
Susan
Curious what you decide. I feel trapped. My Gmail has been my primary account for almost 20 years. With that kind of longevity, switching would be extremely disruptive.
When I did it I just forwarded my mails to the new service (fastmail) and changed mail address whenever a mail got forwarded in. When I didn’t receive a forwarded mail for a year or so I deleted my old mail and never looked back.
If you use a password manager this get easier though, since you can just lookup where the old mail is used.
Never realized this was a benefit of password managers. Even happier I’ve been on Bitwarden a few years now.
I kept Gmail, but gradually switched over to proton. Eventually, year or two later, it’s full of emails I don’t glcare about. Start now and take it slow.
I’ve heard good things about proton. Considering switching to that as well. Other than heading so many places use your old email until you update it is there any reason you did it gradually?
No, that’s the only reason. I didn’t want to flood my new inbox with emails I don’t need.
Try to create a new email on a privacy respecting service and start with setting up email forwarding from Gmail to the new email. Then you just kinda slowly move your accounts over for a period of months or even years. I still keep my unused Gmail forwarding just in case.
Gmail is only 19 years old, but okay.
What makes anyone think google didn’t have the access before anyway?
They certaintly did, and already used AI to comb through it for their monitized stalking campaign. I think the only difference now is you can now make use of this somehow too, but I only read the headline lol.
They did. Its not about that
Now you can throw in a boring pdf, into your drive, and have bard read it and summarize each chapter. For example.
I asked it to read a report i have written for school and summarize it and give mr a few pointers where i could improve it. It was nice and speedy.
Granted the report isnt super long.
Wonder how well it does on a 700 page pdf…
These companies just push hard for people to leave them.
I mean, if Bard can access those things, that means Google already had access in the first place. I also don’t mind if that means I get to enjoy a better service overall.
The things I don’t want Google to know about I have separate anyways
narrator: ‘google knows about those things, too.’
I know people who have their passwords on a google doc or email passwords. I foresee a lot of accounts getting hacked once people can crack the right prompts for the LLM.
Geez! Who does that?
Old people
They’ll probably isolate the models from each other, but yeah, if they want to train shared models from private data then that could happen.
But bard is the public one, right?
Bard is the name of the service, they can create account specific models trained on your user data which aren’t shared with other accounts (as an extension of the base model built on public data). I’ve already read about companies doing this to avoid cross contamination. Pretty sure Google is aware of this.
But I don’t know if Google cares enough about privacy to bother training individual models to avoid cross contamination. Each model takes years worth of super computer time, so the fewer they’d need to train, the less costly.
Extending existing models (retraining) doesn’t need years, it can be done in far less time.
Hmm, I thought one of the problems with LLMs was they’re pretty baked in in the training process. Maybe that was only with respect to removing information?
That won’t work because they’re not going to train Bard on your email contents or documents.
So what does bard do with the access then? Is it like bing chat that can choose to search things?
Most probably yes, it will add those information to the context. Once you delete the chat, those data are gone.
That’s much better than using it for general training. Does anything keep Google from using it for training in the future though?
Probably something similar to what they were doing back in 2010 with Google Now. Skimming data from emails and texts etc in order to give you more pertinent information with Google Assistant’s predecessor. The google now page of that time could tell me when my flight left, what gate it boarded at, if it was delayed, what airport entrance to use. It told me when my bills were due and how much. It tracked orders for me and told me when they were out for delivery or delivered. It would help me to pick a restaurant for a special occasion, direct me where to call or book for a reservation. I found it very useful and then privacy concerns basically tanked it.
We got a rebrand that did some of the same things with Google Assistant. And for a while that was really useful for a lot of the same things. But now that they’ve realised that data collection for this doesn’t net them ever increasing profits there’s a push for new better things. The new better apps and services don’t really do what people want or need. They are specifically and ever increasingly meant to funnel more data to Google and more ads to consumers. There were a lot of potentially really good useful services that this style of scraping provided. But on the other hand, they didn’t ask. They just took that info. And then saved face by sunsetting the product that people were gripping about.
If you use google services at all, google has a profile on you. Even limiting the spec of that profile by opting out of assistant and turning off a lot of their tracking doesn’t necessarily help you maintain privacy. And google services includes their app store and phones.
I mean, at this point I find very difficult to believe that people willingly putting their entire life in free Google accounts don’t know that they’re basically ads meat anyway. The outrage makes no sense.
Without going to whole hog and hosting my own infrastructure, what are some good alternatives?
Looks really nice. Their website doesn’t seem forthcoming about pricing. I don’t like that.
Mailbox, posteo, zoho, skiff…
proton suite. i’m using it since 2016 and never looked back.
I thought it was a get people hooked then charge out the nose later thing.
Switched to outlook but soon found out that some of your emails arent even received. That occured when I was trying to sign up to this lemmy instance. Luckily the admin was a very friendly person who understood the situation and manually approved my signup.
Outlook is just choosing another big tech. Why not something like protonmail or tutanota?
I’m starting to switch over to Proton. I haven’t paid for it yet but my plan is to start paying and potentially grab usernames on other sites so I can have a consistent email across any site I decide to use.
Proton unlimited was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Very nice vpn service that works even on arch Linux on school wifi (making sure to switch to tcp protocol), e2ee mail that I use to send confidential medical records to drs, included simplelogin premium (currently over 400+ aliases), excellent and knowledgeable customer support, and so much more. I just really love this company and their role in the FOSS, privacy, security space.
openai’s chat gpt, and microsoft’s bing flavor of chat gpt both have android apps. google’s bard does not. that is all…
Good luck using all my spam I get on my gmail inbox to serve me ads that get blocked instantly.
Edit: openboard autocorrect.
Queue the I’m in danger meme
Cue* ;)
Dang… you’re right.
