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.
Tuta Mail and PixelUnion!
This is also why I don’t trust Brave either. Any company that profits off an ad network and can change the rules whenever they want is dangerous. Even if Brave doesn’t do it now, doesn’t mean they won’t.
Remember when the entire selling point of Gmail was lots of storage and “no obtrusive ads like Yahoo Mail or Hotmail”? Pepperidge Farms remembers.
Google has turned its back on every single thing it use to stand for. Down to the “don’t be evil” slogan.
It really hasn’t. It’s always been a commercial outfit and it’s been true to that goal: make money. Consumers keep making fantastical stories about a titan of surveillance-capitalism though. It was financed via the CIA and it has been working with the USA’s intelligence-community from day dot. It hasn’t changed. It’s still Google and it will continue being Google.
I still miss the free unlimited 2mp backup for photos.
Turning that off topped off my storage and I’ve been over 90% ever since.
I already have a different email address. I just need an alternative to Google drive, and Google docs then, I can bail on Google forever. I’m so tired of Google doing evil and privacy invasive shit.
Do you need the collaborative aspect of Google docs?
I use it for DnD a lot to take notes and share them with my group. Would be nice to find something with that functionality.
That’s tough because it means convincing everyone to switch to it, whatever it is. I’d give proton drive a whirl. If you’re mostly saving text documents, I don’t think the limitations of the free tiers should even be an issue.
Users concerned about the latest privacy change can disconnect Gmail, Google Photos, and other connected apps from Personal Intelligence or disable Personalized Recommendations through their Google Account settings.
Most important part of the article.
I wonder if that will only stop the ads being personalized or the data collection will also stop. My bet is on the former, but I hope I’m wrong.
Need a direct link or path… Going to hunt now.
Google account settings > data and privacy > Personalization settings > disable and delete all
UGH FINE ASSHOLES I’LL DEGOOGLE
gonna take me like 15 minutes this is outrageous
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
and if you can’t selfhost, ente.io is also a good option. but it’s a different software.
There’s also managed Immich options (although Ente is probably better in this case since it is ecrypted):
https://store.elfhosted.com/product/immich/ (although I don’t think I’d trust a service that appears to be 100% AI-generated).
I’ve been using PixelUnion for some time now to test if I actually am comfortable with deleting Google Photos and I’m pretty sure I’m about to pull the trigger. They’ve been fantastic.
I also tried Ente but I honestly do not like them. It would be ideal if Immich were E2E encrypted but for me the difference in quality is so big that I don’t mind them not being encrypted.
In my opinion it’s also the better option if you can self-host, it’s more mature than Immich.
The definition of vibe coding seems to be very flexible nowadays. It used to mean using AI to generate code without looking at the code (and being a programmer being optional as well).
But some people call any AI assistance vibe coding, which makes any discourse difficult. Because anyone can say “no it’s not” even though you are both in agreement about what’s happening, only because the term is being misused.
I think the new definition for letting AI do all the work is cuck coding (you just tell it what to do) and vibe coding stays more integrated and involved
It launched commercially in early 2021 so the base is definitely human coded
I also made a tool with my brother to share photos with others in a trip:
https://github.com/Linkee12/PhotoBin
You can create a temporary album available for 30days, and everybody can share, select what they want to save and export. You can also put it on a VPS because it’s E2E encrypted, the server doesn’t see your photos.
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.
❤️ You rock 🫶
I love Immich and use it as my primary backup but I had been using Google Photos as my secondary backup (partially out of laziness to find a new offsite backup). Are there any other cheap photo hosts?
Anyone happen to have a large repository of butthole pictures I can borrow?
I use this one on grindr.
What a great reminder to turn off all those trackers. Thanks Lemmy!
I was thinking what a great reminder to take pictures with a camera not a phone.
To listen to music with a music player that has physical memory not cloud.
To keep things separate and private that you want to keep to yourself.
So glad I switched to immich
If you want to take back control of your data, there are open source alternatives to almost every Google product
this needs more visibility
Anyone recommend a self hosted alternative to Google photos?
I know multiple people below you said Immich already but to give more details: it absolutely is one of the most well run and stable self hosted apps I own. Extremely reliable and works exactly as I need it. It was one of the first FOSS applications I supported monetarily because I believed in it so much.
Hands down immich.
There’s multiple. Immich comes to mind
Photoprism or Immich
Photos is immich for sure
Just for completeness: If you are looking for an android gallery app without backup/sync and which is privacy friendly, try Fossify gallery
https://www.fossify.org/apps/gallery/+1 for Fossify, the developer is a great guy who forked the old and now ad-riddled Simple Gallery
Not exactly 1 to 1, but it is also possible to use Jellyfin for this purpose.
Huh. Shows you how cynical I am, I already thought they were doing this.
Google using Gmail to target ads has been a thing since the launch, I remember the articles about it back in the day, and still got a Gmail since it was still soo much better than alternatives like Hotmail.
They stopped doing that in 2017. Until now.
Their own phrasing:
Google does not scan G Suite emails for the purposes of ad targeting
Sounds a lot like weasel wording to me. Could be they’re still scanning - for other pruposes. The article obviously does not clarify.
I’d rather they tell us all the data mining they do do.
I thought i had to disable that shirt years ago. Let me guess… they turned it back on?