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.
That was always the deal with gmail though
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.
Anyone happen to have a large repository of butthole pictures I can borrow?
I use this one on grindr.
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.
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
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.
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.
In my opinion it’s also the better option if you can self-host, it’s more mature than Immich.
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?
I thought i had to disable that shirt years ago. Let me guess… they turned it back on?
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.
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/
Since it seems to be tied to Gemini settings, I think they were not able to design gemini integration in a way that separates data used by gemini from gmail and photos. Let’s say if google uses your gemini chats for targeted ads, if gemini mentions your emails, that will already be part of the data being tracked for ads. So, maybe just disable gemini chat history.
Not able to seems less likely than chose not to. Google has plenty of resources to throw at the problem.
Afaik, the enterprise gemini has data protections so yes they can for those willing to pay enterprise level AI. This is a different case for consumer level AI.
If you want to take back control of your data, there are open source alternatives to almost every Google product
this needs more visibility
Moochs. Everything has become a transaction for them.
It’s not a transaction anymore, the values are skewed so heavily in favour of Google so that it is far better to pay for services that respect your privacy.
It’s an email server. Even the littlest company can afford an email server with some limitations, let alone Google. And right, it’s about values. My gmail account comes from those times that won’t come back.
Fucking hell. Time to take all the photos down. It’s been at least a decade since a photo has been uploaded there, because I knew Google can’t be trusted and I disabled the automatic upload, just hadn’t taken the already uploaded images down. On top of that, for months I have been in the process of moving off gmail to Zoho Mail. Fuck Google.
Taking your photos down may not remove them from their dataset. If they really wanted to they could restore them for their dataset. You wouldn’t ever know.
Huh. Shows you how cynical I am, I already thought they were doing this.
Odd how these headlines always ramp up as Alphabet ( Google) approaches their quarterly earnings report.
