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/
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 “Pops” and pay $500 million “cost of doing business” while making 1000+ billion.
Except you can have one account to cover all those Google services. Meaning it must be trivial for Alphabet/Google to do the same.
Just because your average engineer isn’t allowed to, doesn’t mean they can’t do it at “special requests”, like law enforcement or “research”.
To put it another way, it’s to much potential power to entrust with a single company.
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 [email protected] resolves to google. This has made #email mostly dead to me.
I won’t stop sending to Google recipients. I have moved my email to Proton, but because of lacking search functionality there I have not yet migrated historic emails.
I’ve stopped using other Google services and deleted data except for Maps and YouTube. Maps I can probably get rid of. YouTube I’ll keep but may be able to use a more fake account.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
🤷♂️ you weren’t going to pay for it, gotta pay for compute somehow.
I mean… what else could they offer to make it more comforting?
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.
Gmail is only 19 years old, but okay.
What makes anyone think google didn’t have the access before anyway?
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.
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?
Geez! Who does that?
Old people
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?
deleted by creator
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.
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.’
But individual users can target specific things to get out from the llm training data. I’m more okay with Google tuning it’s spell check on my data than I am to letting anyone who knows how to ask my personality identifiable information. Even if I don’t use Google drive/docs, someone else will use Google for their contacts, and then my security questions (why do companies still make people use those?!?) are public.
Good luck using all my spam I get on my gmail inbox to serve me ads that get blocked instantly.
Edit: openboard autocorrect.
Having generative AI hooked up to workspaces is a clear next step that’s going to be very very popular. I’m not sure why this thread is shocked.
Queue the I’m in danger meme
Cue* ;)
Dang… you’re right.
