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.
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.
3 months later I finally started the process. Got Proton Unlimited and am slowly transitioning my Google drive over
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.
Man I can’t wait to get 100% out of gmail.
What makes anyone think google didn’t have the access before anyway?
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…
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.
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
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?
Their terms and privacy policy I guess. Also the possibility of data leak. I don’t think even Google would train their LLM on knowingly private data, that would be utter insanity.
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.
These companies just push hard for people to leave them.
openai’s chat gpt, and microsoft’s bing flavor of chat gpt both have android apps. google’s bard does not. that is all…
Queue the I’m in danger meme
This is super cool. No longer need to fiddle with third-party LLM APIs.
For those worried that your emails contents might get leaked, I’m pretty sure they’re not using your email content to train, but only use it as context. LLMs are stateless, as soon you you start a new chat, it forgets everything from before.
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?
Mailbox, posteo, zoho, skiff…
I thought it was a get people hooked then charge out the nose later thing.
This is absolutely true. Some of us were fine with the trade off in the beginning, because of how useful the services were when linked together. Google didn’t start off with everything linked like it is now. This unification of all their services with no walls or filters has been an ongoing development for more than a decade. I remember having to be on a waiting list to even get a GMail account after getting an invite from someone I knew. I’ve been around using google services since then. Back when Gmail and the calender weren’t separate apps. When YouTube wasn’t linked to Gmail or a Google account the way it is now. The landscape has changed drastically.
Only reason I ever use my gmail is because they are tied to my phone and some of the games on my phone, otherwise I wouldn’t be using them.
I deleted google and only have game accounts email only from simplelogin aliases. Maybe you’ll eventually realize google is a shit company and leave that environment as well.
As much as I don’t like gøøgl€, on the phone front, it’s the lesser of the two evils I can choose from currently. I probably won’t be able to outright buy my next phone before getting service and slap on a custom ROM, so I’d rather deal with the devil I know over appl€.
I use a degoogled google pixel (grapheneos) so there are definitely options out there.
There definitely are options, but I’m just not sure I’ll be able to outright purchase a phone and flash a ROM like grapheneos on it. I feel as though at this point I’ll probably have to end up just upgrading through my carrier and I don’t know if they even allow you to root or flash phones from them without terminating service.
If you get it from carrier and it’s locked, even google pixels, then you cannot flash custom rom on there.
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.
I wonder what will happen when proprietary Open AI LLM’s start scraping data that the companies use them don’t want scraped because it’s proprietary. IT department using LLM for code for the company wide web portal. And now schematics for a new device are scraped etc.
