It's basically impossible to not use gmail. Even if you don't have a gmail account or address yourself, the person you're emailing probably has it, so your messages gets sent to a gmail server and gets scanned by them. What I want to know is whether Google uses the contents to profile YOU.
Is it impractical to never send a message through Google? Probably, depending on the circles you communicate in. But that's not the same thing as saying it's impractical to avoid Google for most of your messages, and certainly not the same as saying you can't avoid GMail for anything.
My main email is not GMail, but I forward it to a GMail account to get free spam filtering, free backup, and free search. I encourage everyone to do the same.
You don't get spam if you use aliases everywhere. The few that actually get spam can be turned off.
Like I recently had to turn off alias for made4men.no. srsly, signing me up for spam and not removing me from the spam list even after i unsubscribed. You can tell it's a swedish shop that just happens to own a Norwegian domain.
I actually had to do the opposite. I have a filter that catches all messages marked as spam and unmarks them as spam. VERY rarely there's a spam message caught in there. Much more often sth super important that just would have landed in spam if not for my genius spam filter.
This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If everyone reads "it's impossible to avoid gmail, just use gmail", then yeah, gmail prevails.
But it's plain false. YOU can decide against using gmail. I don't use gmail. I sometimes talk with people who use gmail, but more often than not, I don't. Stop being fatalistic.
It’s much cheaper, having an unlimited plan for just $10/year, or even less if you choose usage-based pricing. Otherwise I don’t know as I’ve never used Migadu.
Buy a domain, then you don’t lose your address if you ever decide to jump to a different provider. I use fastmail currently. But I also keep my own backups.
Get your own domain, then you're free to change provider every 2 months and nobody will realise :-).
Then you can try Migadu, Fastmail, Protonmail, Tuta, ... once you own your address (say me@noncoml.com), people won't ever know what provider you are running behind.
This isn’t true and this level of cynicism is really unhelpful.
They originally used Gmail in that way. Many years later they stopped. This was a major victory for privacy. The fact they seem to be doing it now again is bad. Saying they’ve “always done this” is the kind of empty conspiratorial cynicism that dampens action and makes people feel it is futile to notice these changes or speak up about them.
The fact that they did it in the beginning and are doing it now makes the whole “well, there was a period of time when they didn’t do this” seem like a minor footnote to the notion that “they’ve always done this”. Even though the statement isn’t strictly true, it sure seems like the cynicism is warranted now and, with the benefit of hindsight, was back then too.
Meta tracks you on every page that has any Meta script, such as a Facebook like button. They're just better at tracking than Google is, amazingly, because meta plays dirtier.
I don’t think it’s conspiratorial to question how strong the firewall was between your Gmail content and Google’s algorithms. Whether or not they actually leveraged that understanding for targeted ads is somewhat beside the point.
Well, if we didn't have corrupt regulators, Google would have been fined out of existence ages ago.
That said it will be interesting way of exploitation. If you want to find people who have certain email content, you can serve them ads manipulating them into taking an action. Like buying a scam product / malware.
The enshitification of Google is inevitable.
It went from all the space you ever need for your email to "you are at 93% usage. Upgrade to premium" in just a few years.
But then they stopped cause the marginal value of the information they got from gmail was not as large as it used to be. The information from email receipts from purchases was particularly valuable but major retailers stopped providing that in email to limit how much info google could observe.
I think we'd be remiss not to consider general changes in the security landscape: E-mails are not encrypted the same way HTTPS visits are, and from a compliance standpoint it's easier to argue that you did your due-diligence, only showing the information to the authorized person.
In other words, I'd expect the trend to happen regardless of whether Google (or any other company) started spying on customer data for a competitive advantage.
Since the comments are going to be flooded with people reactively assuming it is straight up directly accessing them, here is the actual qualification:
> [they will not use for ads] ... unless you choose to make data from these services available to other Google services that support personalized ads
So it is more reasonable than I think most people are assuming.
I think that's a much lower bar than you are assuming. It's part of their playbook to tie very basic features and integrations with these more controversial measures -- I believe that "make calendar entries from flight confirmations" is on by default and is part of their "share my data with other services" toggle. "Declining to opt out" could also count to them as choosing to make the data available. etc.
The most charitable interpretation is that gemini might get your pictures as context by connecting google photos, then comment on the content of said pictures in its output, and then the output is used to personalize ads (like what chatgpt is doing rn). This indirectly uses google photos data to personalize ads so they have to add this rule to their privacy policy.
> unless you choose to make data from these services available to other Google services that support personalized ads
I don't know if android has changed in the last 10 years, but my last android phone had constant popups in official google apps begging me to enable all sorts of information sharing right across google's ecosystem. The popups were constant. And it was full of dark patterns making it difficult to say no.
Google probably assumes you only see this stuff once. But if you say no, some features didn't work properly and it keeps bugging you.
I don't know how or why, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if 90% of gmail users unintentionally opted themselves in to this "choice" before the end of the year.
You literally can't do anything useful with Gemini (as a Google Assistant replacement) without granting it access to everything. And I mean that in the most literal sense possible. It doesn't know the weather, the time, it can't play music, nothing.
Taken in the most literal sense possible, if you're using Gemini in any capacity today, it's authorized to use your photos to serve you personalized ads.
Funnily it is against GDPR: one must not limit any service if they can be solved without the given data not allowed to be accessed. Of course this is vague enough, but EU has given big fines, thanks for Google's donations to this continent in 5 years.
Also, I do not see how it is "reasonable". I find it evil and malicious. They benefit from user's data, get money and don't give anything to those who gave them their data here. That is also selfish from Google.
Not defending Google in any way, but… they did give free email, search, and other things.
The slight is that they said they wouldn’t and people trusted that would remain true. Then some moral-less, scum sucking, soulless PM convinced enough people they could make money to justify snooping on hundreds of millions of people’s private conversations and enough of those people agreed to make it happen.
As jon said, it is a frew service. Someone, somehow needs to pay for the service, bwing through something as bad as ads from your photos.
We as consumers just need to be more comfortable paying a little to have these services. Immich on a vps is not that much
Don't worry, Google is a trillion dollar company. We've been paying with our privacy, our attention, our psychological health, our economic well-being, and our voice in the democratic process. Even those of us who have de-Googled are paying the price. How much more do we possibly owe them?
That said, I do appreciate that your proposal isn't to pay Google even more though.
I believe the "other services" here includes Personal Intelligence, which Google is pushing very hard anytime you use their AI products directly. I would bet we'll see nudges in more and places. Basically, they want to make it happen.
To be fair, I see where they're coming from: if they're providing you (what they consider) valuable AI services, they would want to monetize it somehow, because that inference ain't free. And people won't pay for it with their money, because they've trained this generation of Internet users to pay with their attention.
I also suspect they have little choice, because they foresee that the old search modality (and with it, their prized cash cow) withering away pretty soon. Personal Intelligence may well be their next big consumer cash cow, and competitors are already swooping in to try to capture that market (especially Apple with its privacy pitch.)
> unless you choose to make data from these services available to other Google services that support personalized ads
Yeah.. And how do you not do that? What are the steps to not make the data from these services available? Is it now? How can we tell? What are the services that support personalized ads anyway? All of them?
This is always how it starts. Then a couple months down the road when everyone has forgotten about it they'll accidentally push out an update that forgets you weren't opted in
A quick way to "remove" ads from podcasts is to auto play from a specific time. Lots of podcasts do all their ads in 15, 30, and 60 second chunks. So simply setting your podcast app to skip forward at those intervals can cut most ads.
So my app auto plays most podcasts at 60 seconds. Then whenever an ad starts I just hit forward X times until they're done.
Its wild how bad advertising has become. I've been blocking and ignoring ads for over a decade. I rarely watch TV or streaming services. I rarely see ads.
Whenever I use other people's tech and get bombarded with ads it's a sensory overload. Not only the sound, colors, etc but just the dense amount of bullshit information. It's all lies. It's all a weird advertising version of what it is. It's all marketing wank.
Whenever I see a good number of advertisements I feel overstimulated and like someone just tried to sell me a car without telling me the truth.
I really don't understand how people stomach advertising. It's so over the top.
I don’t mind the occasional Burma Shave type ad, or this program brought to by Acme Brand Powdered Soap.
Anything that stalks, snoops, tracks, profiles, personifies, “shares”, coerces, scams, scans, or sells any of the aforementioned should be illegal and considered with broad definitions. Minimally jail time for destroying generations of culture.
Right, there's this implied old bargain, and then there's this new stuff which tries to get consumers to pretend nothing changed while violating the old rules willy-nilly.
And ALL THIS SPYING DOESN'T EVEN GIVE YOU BETTER ADS!!
When was the last time you saw an ad for anything that matched your interests, let alone made you actually buy something?
It seems like such a shallow and dumb targeting mostly based on region and language: If I watch just a couple Russian videos on YouTube but never spoke Russian, I get Russians ads! If I fly to Indonesia but never watched any Indonesian videos ever, I get Indonesian ads!
70% of my YouTube views are games, but I only ever see an occasional ad for Eve..
Most of my photos (hundreds and hundreds of them) from the past week are of shitty untidy black spaghetti network racks that are completely beyond all saving and frankly require the building to be flattened and everything rebuilt from scratch.
So if this can help a company find a way to advertise a clean and humane way of solving this problem that doesn't involve me tracking down and deep frying the network engineer that left this unholy mess, then quite frankly I'm all for it any my cash is waiting.
Here's an idea: Targeted ads against workers of companies who buy digital ads. Drown them in content with influencers showing that digital ads have awful returns, and frankly, only people with small genitals decide to buy campaigns.
I've noticed now that google is cf negative, search might as well be called google billboard. they are admaxxing everything for as much rev as possible. its terrible, and i often use perplexity and chat in lieu of google search. as a matter of fact i find perplexity often produces much better results.
If you have your server encrypted at rest, don't you have to manually enter a password or use a hardware key each restart? And then it's not encrypted when running.
> If you self host, why does it matter if it is E2E? What's your threat model?
I prefer E2EE services because clients like GrapheneOS, iPhones, and Macs are a lot harder to hack than a server. And I use Cloudflare tunnels for convenience.
It's also just got really good apps and UX. On par with iCloud photos for the most part, which uses the same model when you have advanced data protection turned on.
Family members, once understanding, would be put at ease by the E2EE. And many people don't self host, so when using it from Ente it's essential. And they just release the stack they themselves run.
I've considered embedding an HSM in my concrete floor, with a USB-cable sticking out to plug into the server. :)
Assuming someone either steals your entire server or nothing, it's either that, password at boot, or some remote unlock (KSM). I doubt a burglar is going to just steal your harddrive. But I doubt they'll think of opening the floor.
Can you quantify the "harder to hack han a server"? This seems like one of those risks that is superficially true, but in practice is low enough to not matter.
I went with Ente for this reason. I have 5 family members on my plan. They'd have likely joined my immich.
1) I don't want their photos on my server in a form I could view. My brothers a stand up guy, but you never know what people are into.
2) I've spent the last 2 years convincing people the cloud is someone elses computer and google can access your photos if it's not E2EE. To then get them using my server.
There was another reason which they solved in the latest release (my wife and I share an album of our daughter automatically via facial recognition).
I guess while I'm at it, the final reason I went with Ente even though it's paid was due to not wanting to be the failure point of my families photos, doing backups etc.
I have a custom domain setup and I can share an album with people without Ente, they can add their photos too.
The ML for facial clustering/recognition is definitely a step behind what google does in the cloud (especially on kids). But with a small amount of massaging it's a very good product.
> The Digital Markets Act (DMA) is a European Union (EU) law that took effect on March 6, 2024. As a result of Article 5(2) of the DMA, in the EU, Google offers you the choice to link certain Google services.
> Those Google services include:
Search
YouTube
Ad services
Google Play
Chrome
Google Shopping
Google Maps
> You can choose to link all these services, choose to have none of these services linked, or choose which of these individual services you want to link.
I've found good alternatives for pretty much everything: search, mail, drive... But I remain pretty addicted to youtube, and haven't found a good alternative to that. Also, my (French) employer uses gmail for mails, calendars and meetings. So I couldn't really escape Google if I wanted to...
You have so much "freedom from" in a world with strong, effective, well-designed regulation. It's unreal. How amazing is it to be able to buy pretty much any food product and eat it without wondering (almost ever in your life!) if it's been tampered with. How amazing is it to have your bank deposits insured up to $200,000. How amazing is it to be able to fly safely anywhere in the world and know it'll be totally perfectly fine with 99.99999% probability. I love regulation.
Google services that are linked by default
The following services are linked by default for users in the European Economic Area (excluding Germany) and can’t be unlinked:
Evil has a name. It begins with 'G' and ends with 'oogle'.
Hopefully you folks don't share information that is or was critical
to your business or family there. Big Brother may be watching. The
name is also Google.
There is so much information you shared there, if you used it, that
can be used for AI sniffing. This is the new future.
Another reason to throw on the pile of needing to setup a new domain to self-host email on, properly planned with 'alias per login' etc.
I'm not sure if the pile is big enough yet to make me do it, but it's getting there.
I might have to have two domains, one for critical communications and logins (banking, finances, tax, etc) and another for all those bullshit web sign ups. Ironically, it's the critical one I'd have to setup 9n a centralised SaaS (and therefore prone to such shenanigans as Google is proposing) in order to make sure communications don't get lost. Having said that, my current Google-hosted domain is free, and so it's likely been used for advertising and AI training already.
Yeah, one of my main points of contact was a gmail address for a number of years. I've switched over to giving out an address on a domain I own but it's a huge pain migrating contacts over.
I hope the younger folks learn better the lesson to own your nameplate - even if you just end up forwarding message to gmail or what-not for consumption, keeping control of the nameplate gives you the flexibility to shift later on.
> I've switched over to giving out an address on a domain I own
Recently some Discord channel started using some other weird "verifier" bot plugin thing and they refuse, claiming my long-time personal domain is "high risk" for no discernible reason.
I'm scared of a future where you have to be in the positively good graces of 4-6 email/SSO monopolies to avoid becoming a digital nonperson.
It has nothing to do with Discord, they are talking about some third party bot verification plugin
The unfortunate reality is that if third party disposable email services didn't exist then it wouldn't have such a distrust for random domains. Anyone can just throw up an email service on a new domain and then anyone can start using it for fraud and abuse. If you've never run a freemium service then you might not know just how wide scale this sort of fraud is
Is it impractical to never send a message through Google? Probably, depending on the circles you communicate in. But that's not the same thing as saying it's impractical to avoid Google for most of your messages, and certainly not the same as saying you can't avoid GMail for anything.
Like I recently had to turn off alias for made4men.no. srsly, signing me up for spam and not removing me from the spam list even after i unsubscribed. You can tell it's a swedish shop that just happens to own a Norwegian domain.
I actually had to do the opposite. I have a filter that catches all messages marked as spam and unmarks them as spam. VERY rarely there's a spam message caught in there. Much more often sth super important that just would have landed in spam if not for my genius spam filter.
But it's plain false. YOU can decide against using gmail. I don't use gmail. I sometimes talk with people who use gmail, but more often than not, I don't. Stop being fatalistic.
They are saying you are using Gmail when you communicate with someone on Gmail.
https://purelymail.com/
Super cheap. Has WebDAV, calendar, email filtering, etc. The docs are dead simple.
I load it with like $10 every couple years. Never worry about it.
Then you can try Migadu, Fastmail, Protonmail, Tuta, ... once you own your address (say me@noncoml.com), people won't ever know what provider you are running behind.
They originally used Gmail in that way. Many years later they stopped. This was a major victory for privacy. The fact they seem to be doing it now again is bad. Saying they’ve “always done this” is the kind of empty conspiratorial cynicism that dampens action and makes people feel it is futile to notice these changes or speak up about them.
Information google has on me - my entire life
Yet meta ads are far more eerily relevant. This could imply two things -
a) Meta’s recommendation team is exponentially better (unlikely)
b) Google doesn’t use gmail and workspace data for ads
If you say no, the secret is "we already did it".
That was all used as training data.
That said it will be interesting way of exploitation. If you want to find people who have certain email content, you can serve them ads manipulating them into taking an action. Like buying a scam product / malware.
What makes you believe that was their motivation?
In other words, I'd expect the trend to happen regardless of whether Google (or any other company) started spying on customer data for a competitive advantage.
https://archive.is/xjSZA
Though it seems Yahoo was the more aggressive offender
For your safety I'm sure.
If it is for click tracking there are far efficient ways to do that.
> [they will not use for ads] ... unless you choose to make data from these services available to other Google services that support personalized ads
So it is more reasonable than I think most people are assuming.
Most likely you will agree to share it with “other Google services” just by setting up an Android phone.
I don't know if android has changed in the last 10 years, but my last android phone had constant popups in official google apps begging me to enable all sorts of information sharing right across google's ecosystem. The popups were constant. And it was full of dark patterns making it difficult to say no.
Google probably assumes you only see this stuff once. But if you say no, some features didn't work properly and it keeps bugging you.
I don't know how or why, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if 90% of gmail users unintentionally opted themselves in to this "choice" before the end of the year.
i know because i went through this.
Taken in the most literal sense possible, if you're using Gemini in any capacity today, it's authorized to use your photos to serve you personalized ads.
Also, I do not see how it is "reasonable". I find it evil and malicious. They benefit from user's data, get money and don't give anything to those who gave them their data here. That is also selfish from Google.
The slight is that they said they wouldn’t and people trusted that would remain true. Then some moral-less, scum sucking, soulless PM convinced enough people they could make money to justify snooping on hundreds of millions of people’s private conversations and enough of those people agreed to make it happen.
Is it that easy at these companies to change policies like these?
That said, I do appreciate that your proposal isn't to pay Google even more though.
To be fair, I see where they're coming from: if they're providing you (what they consider) valuable AI services, they would want to monetize it somehow, because that inference ain't free. And people won't pay for it with their money, because they've trained this generation of Internet users to pay with their attention.
I also suspect they have little choice, because they foresee that the old search modality (and with it, their prized cash cow) withering away pretty soon. Personal Intelligence may well be their next big consumer cash cow, and competitors are already swooping in to try to capture that market (especially Apple with its privacy pitch.)
Yeah.. And how do you not do that? What are the steps to not make the data from these services available? Is it now? How can we tell? What are the services that support personalized ads anyway? All of them?
So my app auto plays most podcasts at 60 seconds. Then whenever an ad starts I just hit forward X times until they're done.
It isnt automated but it gets rid if most ads.
Driver of overconsumption.
Keeping us hooked on social media feeds.
Targeting children, making them use addictive products.
Making everything more expensive (because we are paying for the ads eventually).
Collecting our data.
Sometimes allowing malware to be installed on our systems.
Frustrating the idea that the best product should win; instread the one with the biggest advertising budget wins.
...
That's why I go to a lot of effort to block as much of it as possible for myself and my family, and to some extent, extended family and friends.
Advertising is a gross perversion of 'service' and a symptom of Uber-capitalism. It is psychological manipulation.
Whenever I use other people's tech and get bombarded with ads it's a sensory overload. Not only the sound, colors, etc but just the dense amount of bullshit information. It's all lies. It's all a weird advertising version of what it is. It's all marketing wank.
Whenever I see a good number of advertisements I feel overstimulated and like someone just tried to sell me a car without telling me the truth.
I really don't understand how people stomach advertising. It's so over the top.
Anything that stalks, snoops, tracks, profiles, personifies, “shares”, coerces, scams, scans, or sells any of the aforementioned should be illegal and considered with broad definitions. Minimally jail time for destroying generations of culture.
When was the last time you saw an ad for anything that matched your interests, let alone made you actually buy something?
It seems like such a shallow and dumb targeting mostly based on region and language: If I watch just a couple Russian videos on YouTube but never spoke Russian, I get Russians ads! If I fly to Indonesia but never watched any Indonesian videos ever, I get Indonesian ads!
70% of my YouTube views are games, but I only ever see an occasional ad for Eve..
Most of my photos (hundreds and hundreds of them) from the past week are of shitty untidy black spaghetti network racks that are completely beyond all saving and frankly require the building to be flattened and everything rebuilt from scratch.
So if this can help a company find a way to advertise a clean and humane way of solving this problem that doesn't involve me tracking down and deep frying the network engineer that left this unholy mess, then quite frankly I'm all for it any my cash is waiting.
Conspicuously absent from the "sensitive categories" is political leanings...
What you need is encryption at rest yes?
> If you self host, why does it matter if it is E2E? What's your threat model?
I prefer E2EE services because clients like GrapheneOS, iPhones, and Macs are a lot harder to hack than a server. And I use Cloudflare tunnels for convenience.
It's also just got really good apps and UX. On par with iCloud photos for the most part, which uses the same model when you have advanced data protection turned on.
Family members, once understanding, would be put at ease by the E2EE. And many people don't self host, so when using it from Ente it's essential. And they just release the stack they themselves run.
Assuming someone either steals your entire server or nothing, it's either that, password at boot, or some remote unlock (KSM). I doubt a burglar is going to just steal your harddrive. But I doubt they'll think of opening the floor.
Can you quantify the "harder to hack han a server"? This seems like one of those risks that is superficially true, but in practice is low enough to not matter.
Where are your E2EE keys?
1) I don't want their photos on my server in a form I could view. My brothers a stand up guy, but you never know what people are into. 2) I've spent the last 2 years convincing people the cloud is someone elses computer and google can access your photos if it's not E2EE. To then get them using my server.
There was another reason which they solved in the latest release (my wife and I share an album of our daughter automatically via facial recognition).
I guess while I'm at it, the final reason I went with Ente even though it's paid was due to not wanting to be the failure point of my families photos, doing backups etc.
I have a custom domain setup and I can share an album with people without Ente, they can add their photos too.
The ML for facial clustering/recognition is definitely a step behind what google does in the cloud (especially on kids). But with a small amount of massaging it's a very good product.
> The Digital Markets Act (DMA) is a European Union (EU) law that took effect on March 6, 2024. As a result of Article 5(2) of the DMA, in the EU, Google offers you the choice to link certain Google services.
> Those Google services include:
> You can choose to link all these services, choose to have none of these services linked, or choose which of these individual services you want to link.https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/14202510?hl=en
So at least European users will be able to get personalized search and photos results without also having to share that data for personalized ads.
/s
Why trust Google of they aren't acting in your interest?
Google services that are linked by default The following services are linked by default for users in the European Economic Area (excluding Germany) and can’t be unlinked:
Accommodations
Android Auto
Android Automotive OS
Android Studio
Android TV
AOSP for TV
Assistant
Authenticator
Blogger
Calculator
Chrome OS
Chrome Web Store
Clock
Contacts
Digital Wellbeing
Files By Google
Find My Device
Flights
Gallery Go
Gboard
Gemini Apps
Gemini Notebook
Google Alerts
Google Arts & Culture
Google Automotive
Services (GAS)
Google Earth
Google One
Google Pay
Google Photos
Google Sign-In
Google Store
Google Trends
Google TV
Groups
Messages
Nest
News
Personal Safety
Photomath
PhotoScan
Recorder
Snapseed
Translate
Wallet
Waze
Wear OS
Weather
Workspace
Evil has a name. It begins with 'G' and ends with 'oogle'.
Hopefully you folks don't share information that is or was critical to your business or family there. Big Brother may be watching. The name is also Google.
There is so much information you shared there, if you used it, that can be used for AI sniffing. This is the new future.
I'm not sure if the pile is big enough yet to make me do it, but it's getting there.
I might have to have two domains, one for critical communications and logins (banking, finances, tax, etc) and another for all those bullshit web sign ups. Ironically, it's the critical one I'd have to setup 9n a centralised SaaS (and therefore prone to such shenanigans as Google is proposing) in order to make sure communications don't get lost. Having said that, my current Google-hosted domain is free, and so it's likely been used for advertising and AI training already.
I hope the younger folks learn better the lesson to own your nameplate - even if you just end up forwarding message to gmail or what-not for consumption, keeping control of the nameplate gives you the flexibility to shift later on.
Recently some Discord channel started using some other weird "verifier" bot plugin thing and they refuse, claiming my long-time personal domain is "high risk" for no discernible reason.
I'm scared of a future where you have to be in the positively good graces of 4-6 email/SSO monopolies to avoid becoming a digital nonperson.
The unfortunate reality is that if third party disposable email services didn't exist then it wouldn't have such a distrust for random domains. Anyone can just throw up an email service on a new domain and then anyone can start using it for fraud and abuse. If you've never run a freemium service then you might not know just how wide scale this sort of fraud is
I went into internets in 1995. Must I tell you about fraud and abuse in early 2000s?
Blocking domains is a cheap shot. It ticks a box somewhere maybe, but it does not and can not prevent or mitigate.