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.
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.
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.
Do you need the collaborative aspect of Google docs?
UGH FINE ASSHOLES I’LL DEGOOGLE
gonna take me like 15 minutes this is outrageous
Anyone happen to have a large repository of butthole pictures I can borrow?
I use this one on grindr.
For what I do understand is that they will use your pictures to serve you targeted ads to what you are interested of, if that’s the case probably you’ll get ads about butthole bleaching
Oh, I don’t mind all that. As long as I get the pictures.
I too am very interested in this.
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.
Targeted advertising should be illegal. Solves a lot of problems. You can pick an ad based on its location (sports.example.com can have sports ads and astrology.example.com star ads), but not based on who’s viewing it. Now there’s less motivation to read all your personal information.
You ever tried to enforce the changes needed to stop all of that tracking on a small group of friends/family? The number of people that actually like it as long as the down sides are not put in there face is wild.
I don’t mean this as disagreement, just an interesting observation about people.
Agreed, targeted advertising and collecting private information about a person and storing it should be illegal. Decentralized systems, cryptocurrency or tokenized payments, and ephemeral order data that is wiped immediately after fulfillment should be standard. The Internet should be privacy focused.
Yes! Or even just any limits on targeting granularity. Like “show ads for my nail salon to all the women in a 3 mile radius” seems fine. But “show this ad to women aged 33 who have 3 cats and who have been to Kohl’s twice in the last month and have watched at least 30 seconds of videos about Charlie Kirk” is just fucking insane, and they go even farther than that.
I mean yeah it’s the old way to serve ads but it’s incredibly inefficient. Even an example as broad as sports.com, ESPN+ might want to advertise but they only offer their service in the US. They don’t want to pay for impressions from users in France, so a minimum would be geo targeting based on IP.
When you get down to medium and small business, I could have some watches to sell to sports dudes, but my campaign budget is $10,000 so I would only target men 40+ because 20 year old college football fans can’t afford the product.
I don’t like the ad ecosystem but people generally don’t want to pay subscriptions for websites but like the publisher’s content. Publishers gotta get paid somehow.
I mean yeah it’s the old way to serve ads but it’s incredibly inefficient.
Why do we have to make advertising efficient?
Personally I think advertising needs a LOT more regulation.
The entities paying for the advertising demand it. It could be untargeted but the conversion rate falls so the ROI of paying ads is less, leading to less to spend per campaign.
Publishers can show the untargeted ads but they get paid less per impression.
That’s kinda the point. If we can’t have economic growth without considering the humanistic aspect of it, then maybe we don’t deserve said economic growth.
And that’s why it should be regulated heavily. Advertising uses scientifically backed methods to short circuit people’s judgement and drive consumerism.
I’ve already agreed the ads ecosystem sucks.
If you had it your way, small businesses could probably not afford to advertise online. It would only be businesses who could blanket the internet with their banners at mass scale without targeting.
We already have GDPR, TCF 2 and various other privacy frameworks and laws localized. What do you want to change?
I personally like publishers staying in businesses who produce valuable content.
If a website can tell what zip code you’re in based on IP, that’s good enough. If someone is using a VPN and their approximate location is obfuscated, the USER can choose to volunteer their location if they want localized ads.
Targeted advertising of any kind should be voluntary.
I also believe billboards should be taken down. Advertisers have been given carte blanche to hijack our eyes, ears, and attention without permission for far too long.
TV and radio managed just fine for years without targeted ads. They targeted the ads based on the content. Saturday morning cartoons advertised toys and ceral. Daytime TV advertises medicare advantage plans for retirees. Country radio advertises white hoods or whatever.
Meanwhile, subscription services without ads also made money.
Targeted ads were never necessary. Outlaw them and the internet and media companies won’t disappear.
TV and Radio ads are somewhat targeted because at a minimum your location is known, either within the radio tower reach or the channels you have access to and/or geolocation your TV provider has access to.
Monday Night Football does not show the same ads in every region. Some are national and others are local, there is still some programattic at play. If you watch through a smart TV you’ll get CTV ads for sure.
You can still target ads based on location, but you do it through targeted content like they used to, which also g9ves us more diverse content.
When a local business wanted to put an ad out and didn’t want to go nationwide, they’d advertise in the local paper. Now they just pay Google to target people, which is why 90% of local news has died.
A mix of both would be great. Something where your target your ads based on the content only, like the old days, and you don’t need to know your customers at all. Only what you guess they’re most likely to be interested in.
Put gaming ads on twitch streams, or pay a youtuber to be a sponsor. They’re plenty of ways to “target your ads” while not needing to gather all the information you can possibly gather on every single individual in the world
Yeah there’s a been a few attempts at “privacy preserving” user id hashing like Google Topics, ID5, and many more.
Publishers love private deals for ad spend, it’s just more work and can be inconsistent vs programmatic that is less revenue but always flowing.
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.
I thought i had to disable that shirt years ago. Let me guess… they turned it back on?
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.
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?
❤️ You rock 🫶
Anyone recommend a self hosted alternative to Google photos?
Not exactly 1 to 1, but it is also possible to use Jellyfin for this purpose.
Hands down immich.
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.
There’s multiple. Immich comes to mind
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
Photos is immich for sure
If you want to take back control of your data, there are open source alternatives to almost every Google product
this needs more visibility
How long until this gets used as a reason to gaslight people into using the memory leak browser? 🤔
Huh. Shows you how cynical I am, I already thought they were doing this.
