Note that this is specifically Consumer Gemini with Connected Apps; Workspace Gemini (and Workspace Intelligence, the RAG thing for enterprise/Workspace) still claims not to be subject to human review:<p><a href="https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/generative-ai/generative-ai-in-google-workspace-privacy-hub" rel="nofollow">https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/generative-ai/g...</a><p>So basically if you use consumer Gemini and specifically authorize the GMail app, for example, then it will sometimes use the GMail tool to load your mail from GMail, and that data (like all data in consumer Gemini) might be given to the human annotation pipeline.<p>This whole thing seems deeply stupid to me from Google's standpoint, although they've never been good at product management - there's _way_ too much nuance to what's going on and even if they aren't technically affected, this kind of thing will almost surely make their paying enterprise customers leery.
Any time I’ve opened Gemini it’s given me a full screen “do you want to allow connected apps” popup and I click no every single time.<p>It’s not clear what clicking yes does. Is it my entire drive and Gmail? Do I have to give permission per-file/folder/email?<p>So I click no. And it just gives me the popup again later
It allows Gemini to autonomously search anything in your Drive or email. If it deems it relevant to the conversation, Gemini can pull summaries, snippets, or even the file plaintext of the file into the context window, making it eligible for human review.
> It’s not clear<p>It's really embarrassing that Google does these things, its even more embarassing that their UI / UX is just really awful and all over the place. I've never been in the shoes of having to push a dark pattern into production, but I can't help but feel I'd start looking to work literally anywhere else.
Corporate Harassment
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Just use uBlock Origin and select the popup with the element picker to remove it forever
Instead, the people publishing these types of routines should be named publicly, so that those dealing with them on a daily basis can spit in their mouth.
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How many years on are we with dark patterns and nagware?<p>It hasn’t been that simple for a very long time.
Okay I’ll just pretend to not use any of the gazillion tools and products that tries to coerce me into a deal against my informed consent. Surely I’ll beat the system.
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Wasn't a free market and competition supposed to take care of these problems?<p>It seems like as things get more advanced, you don't really have alternatives, and companies can get away with things knowing you don't have much choice.
This all to me sounds like a serious class-action lawsuit.
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4-hour account with just LLM copy-paste comments is not a good look. (Yes, I know it's the submitter-account.)
"Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans."
Somebody should start an "exceeds authorized access" computer fraud and abuse case prosecution over this. Perhaps the new Texas state attorney general.
only leetcode brainlets left at that company lmao
It's worse than that.<p>> Google Photos data is used to infer your interests, relationships to people in your photos, and where you've been, including by associating your face with corresponding location data and timestamps. This data is also used to do things for you, like look up your info or add items to your grocery list, and to improve Google services, including training generative AI.<p>How does that work exactly if the images aren't even real and are generated by AI? When Google siphons up these photos to help them train their AI, the AI is now going to make associations as depicted in that photograph?<p>That you really were with that person, in that place, in that situation, on that date? As some sort of a fact?<p>Can someone else create that image and just put it in their library and then have that become a fact on your behalf when picked up, analyzed and trained on?<p>Where does that all lead?
I have never been more glad to have moved to a self hosted immich server on an old laptop.
As soon as AI started blowing up I rushed all of my data out of Google and to self hosted. It's obvious they were going to suck it all up in to their training and analyze everything to build a perfect profile on you. They always were but the capabilities are supercharged now.<p>Immich + Nextcloud + Dawarich behind Tailscale has been a dream. I picked up a second hand HP mini PC for cheap, 3D printed a mini server rack to mount it in with some hard drives.
i need to do this. bit scared my old laptop will die suddently and all my photos will be lost
Attach a USB hard drive and create a nightly rsync job
Use Arq to send a snapshot to S3 daily, encrypted with a key you keep safe separately.
That feeling is your cue to do something about it. Don’t let best be the enemy of good. Automatic backups are great, but if you have irreplaceable data that it would pain you to lose, go get an external hard drive and dump it all on that, right now.
never tried 1-2-3 rule of backups ?<p>(me neither, but i should)
Most modern AI models carry watermarks embedded in images and text, so they can know if something is AI or not. These are probably detected and discarded from the training set.
I have tried to degoogle my life. I already have a way to get my photos to my own server. But how can I take photos on my phone without google getting their fingers into them?
I switched to iOS as the lesser of two evils. Sure, for all their supposed privacy focus Apple does some sketchy stuff too, but at least my personal data is a little bit siloed this way.<p>I did run CyanogenMod / LineageOS for several years but the reliability I needed just wasn’t there. This may have improved since then, though.
Leads to people start calling their senator and start pushing to regulate and break apart every big tech... just as they torrent everything (whoops), they will access everything...
Really frustrating that our privacy eroded to the point anyone would think this is reasonable.<p>But it does explain some conversations with Gemini when I wonder why it's talking about particular things. Like asking it about consultation processes for changes to parks only to get a response that's uncannily tuned to the email I got prompting the enquiry.<p>No mention of I just read your emails etc .
I mean, trusting Google from the beginning was always a losing game.
"search is deeply connected to AI"<p>in case the reply is not clear, I mean to emphasize and amplify the alarming Google behavior described above
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There are 5 major frontier labs competing in the US alone with serious capital. Perhaps only 2 of them are are truly in contention for the top spot, but it's highly competitive. Then throw in the handful of very serious sub-frontier open weights labs, who are creating huge price competition for the frontier labs, and I have no idea how you can come to this conclusion.<p>Cloud is no different: 3 major cloud vendors, with 1 clear leader...and now a long tail of tier 2s and neoclouds that are also investing incredible sums to compete.<p>Where is the pre-structured duopoly? Where is the profit moating?
Build a Beautiful Bubble and self host as much as you can
Google and the companies it considers its competitors in a given space (e.g. primarily Microsoft in "workspace" and cloud storage, for example) have already demonstrated for over a decade that they're willing to use any data you store in their services for any purpose they feel like, and often much of this is written into EULAs, but also it doesn't seem to matter if it isn't. I hope that if this is your first exposure to this basic fact, it encourages you to stop trusting google and look for alternatives with auditable guarantees
Any tool having manual human reviewers or annotator like all of Gemini and notebooklm (now Gemini notebook) suffer from this. Your data has high chance being read by random people or being leaked for training because they might flag it then use it to "improve" the model.
I think it's right to keep the Google side as a tool, and have an AI that plays a personal assistant role and work by talking with it. Honestly, checking everything one by one is too much, so I wish it would rate the importance and filter down to only the things I really need to check.
In the name of the AI race we are taking a lot of shortcuts (privacy, quality, commercial viability etc). As anyone in software knows, the debt will eventually become due.
That's just irresponsible. If this is anything like old Google search reviews (Appen, etc.) then they will hire anyone as a contractor. I don't want my data being reviewed by some random person.
Any one trusting Google, Facebook with their data is wilfully blind. Their whole business model and survival based on spying on others data.
I don't have any data on google drives. :) Didn't want to trust them from the get go.
Not that surprised. I dropped gemini as soon as I learned that I could not opt out of google using my chats for training.
Privacy is irrelevant going forward
Another good reason to fully de-Google. And de-Apple, de-Microsoft, ...
These things make my blood boil!<p>Unfortunately, the alternatives are all so bad...
Self hosting is not all that bad. If you are willing to do a bit of work you can actually get decent results at a fraction of the cost.
I am in the process of moving my stuff from Google to selfhosted alternatives. Google Photos => Immich, Google Drive => probably Next Cloud or some better alternative.<p>I am also looking into how to selfhost my email (and yes I know, the horror of inboxing from self hosting. But I am at the point of not only willing to give it a tr, but actively saying "fuck you" to everybody that does not receive my email, because they are on Outlook or O365 (or Google, bt inboxing into Google is easier imho).<p>Especially with my paid Google now daily having spam in my inbox, while valid emails are so often in spam, that I have to check spam at least once per week.
As someone who self hosts many services, I would encourage you to switch to self hosted email last. Even though self hosting has been made much easier thanks to really incredible FOSS tools, you are going to have random learning pains, some delayed by a few months, and it would really suck to lose email for even the shortest durations. The others are easy to live without while you debug during the learning process.<p>Btw immich is incredible. I recommend Nextcloud AIO instead of raw Nextcloud. Absolutely great tools
I’m looking to set up immich on my server. How do you back up your media? If you get hit by a bus how do you leave instructions and mechanisms to your family to restore the backup? My wife won’t move off of iCloud until I have a great answer for those.
One idea is to attach a USB hard drive and set a nightly job to rsync the Immich folders there. Worst case, if no one's willing to rebuild Immich, they just detach the hard drive, attach to any computer, and copy/paste the whole folder onto iCloud or GDrive. Probably best to format the USB hard drive as FAT32 so that any computer can read it.
I use Restic + Rclone to create an encrypted snapshot to Google Drive. It's easier if you pick an S3 compatible storage though.<p>That way Google has no ability to read the data and it's only a just in case backup if my NAS goes up in flames.<p>You could write down a document on exactly how to pull the data off the backup.
I think the low cost reasonable option right now is to self-host a receiving address and then pick the email provider that looks the least trash and forward your stuff to them to actually handle sending/browsing. It gives you the option to go full self-hosted in the future if your mind changes with minimal headaches but costs practically no effort for the short term.
This is what I do. OpenSMTPD to receive mail, Dovecot to handle IMAP and spamassassin for full spam rules control.<p>I still configure my clients (Thunderbird, K-9, etc.) to send to my mail server, but that just forwards on to the actual email sender (if authenticated). This way I can change email senders without needing to change all my clients. There are still risks though because if you choose the cheaper plan (as I do), then you get grouped onto a sending pool that spammers might use and then you might get periodically affected if that set of IPs take a reputation hit.<p>My config for sending: With OpenSMTPD, process it with DKIM:<p><pre><code> action "process_dkim" relay host smtp://127.0.0.1:10027
match from auth for any action "process_dkim"
</code></pre>
A local DKIM process then processes and sends back to OpenSMTPD:<p><pre><code> listen 127.0.0.1:10027
relay 127.0.0.1:10028
[...] DKIM signing config [...]
</code></pre>
Then back to OpenSMTPD to forward to the final email sender:<p><pre><code> listen on lo port 10028 tag DKIM
action "process_outbound" relay host smtp+tls://label@... auth <secrets>
match tag DKIM for any action "process_outbound"
</code></pre>
I'm not sure if I even need to sign with DKIM as my email sender does the final DKIM signing, but it seems that in the email world, it's always best to do things as "properly" as possible whenever you can.<p>I've been doing this for years, and spam and deliverability issues have been minimal and I've dealt with some big names.
I've spent the last decade building a Dropbox alternative that works on top of any storage protocol (SFTP, S3, SMB, IFS, GIT WebDAV, local disk, and literally everything else [1]) and its on github [2]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.filestash.app/docs/plugin/#storage" rel="nofollow">https://www.filestash.app/docs/plugin/#storage</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash</a>
Don't self host email. Checkout purelymail or a similar alternative<p>Self hosting email is a nightmare and can bite you in the ass big time.
As another commenter noted, it's really not so bad, just probably don't self-host _sending_ email: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50433228">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50433228</a><p>Self-hosting receiving emails isn't too bad. And you can still control sending too as a relay to the actual sender.
There are still no feasible alternatives to Google Drive that make sharing content with others with minimal hoops easy.
Proton has Mail, Drive, and a LLM web chat, they all work pretty well for me.
These days it is really a breeze. Email, Drive clone and everything. Just need to invest bit a for hardware.
I had a Google Meet Gemini transcription take well over 24hours once recently, rather than the usual <1hr. I could only assume manual intervention was the cause.<p>It might also explain why Google do not provide a page to view transcription job queues from meet. You just have to sit and wonder
There are explicit data retention contracts for Workspace (including Gemini transcription) and Google claim this data is never used for training or human review, so this is fairly baseless.<p>This gist is specifically about the consumer version of Gemini used in Gemini Apps. Basically if you connect your consumer Gemini (which always sends stuff to the training pipeline) to your personal Google Apps account, it gets tools that it can invoke to read your Google Apps data, which then might appear back in your consumer Gemini transcripts that are getting sent to the training pipeline.<p>Doing this is a stupid product move from Google (per the usual) because it confuses their enterprise customers into thinking Really Bad Stuff like this is happening.
The only thing they seem to never route to humans is support.
So that photo that you sent on email to someone when you thought email was private... it's going to be reviewed and annotated... and trained on it... remind me what stop the thing from becoming the v.001 of the big brother surveillance tool?
Of course they do. Now that all the freely available training material has been consumed, every website ingested, every image classified, every YouTube video watched, and even books scanned and destroyed, the insatiable hunger for more data must be fed.
They could have had everything - infinite money and control, being a good little monopolist.<p>But no, they had to go full AI psychosis - and it will cost them everything.
Now it's the best time to establish a company: you break the law and say "It's AI, not me". And no one goes to jail.
Gemini is the worst AI agent I've used so no big loss here. Another great move to get people to move off Google services.
Is anybody surprised? Cat was let out of the bag with those mathies who chatted up AI and then AI stole their thunder.
I used to feel very 'old man yells at sky' when I told people they were being naive using Google Drive (Or any other 'cloud storage' for that matter).<p>I have a strong 'told you so' feeling right now.
Guess this is another reason to migrate to local LLMs ASAP.
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