Now Google says it might use your Gmail and Google Photos data to target ads

Posted by JustSkyfall 4 days ago

Comments

Comment by actapp80 4 days ago

> About DMA & your linked services

> 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.

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.

Comment by 3 days ago

Comment by a3nz3g 3 days ago

DSA?

Comment by 3 days ago

Comment by esperent 3 days ago

From that link:

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

Comment by stein1946 4 days ago

I was told that regulation does not work and that I should vote with my wallet.

Comment by throwaway_7274 3 days ago

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.

Comment by ThunderSizzle 3 days ago

Probably should still consider voting with your wallet though...

Why trust Google of they aren't acting in your interest?

Comment by thrance 3 days ago

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...

Comment by jmathai 4 days ago

PSA: Getting out of Google Photos is both easy and super rewarding if you can run Immich and use Google Takeout. It’s also better than Google Photos.

https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/my-ridiculously-robust-pho...

Comment by mceachen 3 days ago

Don't rely on Google Takeouts for byte-perfect backups of your Google Photos library.

Depending on the device that uploaded the media and your country, they may have stripped GPS metadata from your media. I've also had captured-at times get changed randomly (!!) from your original media.

If possible, pull your media directly off your smartphone to make sure there are no shenanigans going on.

(These were painful discoveries made while trying to help support my PhotoStructure users)

Comment by jmathai 3 days ago

PhotoStructure looks great, by the way. I have known about it for some time and love to see great open source photo offerings.

Comment by mceachen 3 days ago

Just to clarify, I've open sourced a ton of PhotoStructure (exiftool-vendored, batch-cluster, fs-metadata, @photostructure/sqlite, sqlite-vec, and 10 more repos), but PhotoStructure's frontend and backend integrations are not open source. If PhotoStructure, Inc. ever closes, though, I will open source the repos powering the consumer product.

I've written open source for several decades, and certainly enjoyed the spoils of open source, but I've also seen a ton of bad behavior. Keeping it closed source certainly is not a guarantee that I avoid intellectual property theft or license violations, but at least I'm not just one agent prompt away from someone rebranding and reselling what I've worked full-time on for more than a decade.

Comment by jmathai 2 days ago

Open source let your project be rebranded and resold. That happened to me a decade ago. A company named ClickUp rebranded https://github.com/photo/frontend. It’s a risk with Apache 2.0.

Turned out not to materially impact our efforts. But it felt like a gut punch at the time.

AI enables this for closed source. Reputation and community are durable differentiators nowadays. I hope your 10 years of investment provides that.

Comment by mceachen 2 days ago

Oh man that's rough.

Your experience would make for excellent feedback for me if you're willing, email hello@ my domain name if you want complementary PLUS!

Comment by brendoelfrendo 3 days ago

This is what I did, but I found that it didn't preserve metadata when I tried to reupload my photos to Immich... everything showed up as though the picture was taken the day I uploaded it.

Comment by slickdork 3 days ago

I did google take out > immich and it maintained all meta data.

I used https://github.com/simulot/immich-go

Comment by kwanbix 3 days ago

I tried Google Takeout but with 900GB of photos is almost impossible to download.

Comment by jmathai 3 days ago

Sounds like a great reason to gtfo.

Comment by cyberclimb 3 days ago

They split it up into distinct zip or tgz files at configurable max size. e.g. giving 18 distinct 50GB tgz files.

If you have enough disk space it should be a problem, you also get about a week to download the archives

Comment by ThunderSizzle 3 days ago

You could do smaller increments and script it so your only doing 10GB at a time.

Comment by 0xR1CK 3 days ago

rclone speeds things up a bit.

Comment by cyberclimb 3 days ago

Last I checked (6 month ago or so) rclone was only able to download Google photos that had been uploaded via API/rclone. Other google photos weren't accessible.

Whereas Google drive does not have this problem.

Has the situation changed?

Comment by mw67 3 days ago

yeah I've done it recently, just use claude code to use rclone on a server and let it run automatically, its great and easy.

Comment by soraminazuki 3 days ago

But by using Claude Code, you're essentially handing over your data from Google's bot to another data-hungry bot run by an equally untrustworthy entity.

You don't need an anthropomorphized computer program running on trillion dollar companies' servers just to run `rclone copy`.

Comment by subscribed 3 days ago

You're not syncing photos to anthropic services, you're not even using Claude code to run rclone for you, and specifically you're not ingesting every synchronised photo or video into the context.

You're not authorising CC to access your photos.

Claude Code is used to prepare the rclone run.

What do you mean that by using cc you're handing over your data (presumably synced photos) you're handing over your data"?

Comment by soraminazuki 3 days ago

The comment I was responding to only said "just use claude code." So every single word you wrote in your reply is a hallucination.

If you genuinely believe that "just use claude code" means any of the things you wrote, you are definitely not careful enough to take the precautions necessary to contain commercial spyware. Claude Code would read your credentials and probe your files to "see if everything is set up correctly" and you won't think twice about it.

And again, all this just to run `rclone copy`.

Comment by subscribed 3 days ago

LOL, speaking about the projection.

OK, explain, what to the "just use Claude code" means in your opinion.

From your words it's literally using the coding harness to access Google Photos and fopy/backup these photos/videos, still within the Claude code.

Is this what you'd do? Because that's the only way I'd understand someone to go on such rant.

Comment by soraminazuki 3 days ago

> OK, explain, what to the "just use Claude code" means in your opinion.

I see you didn't get the message. It's not about opinions. Don't add a bunch of extra meanings to suit your argument.

The original comment was:

> just use claude code to use rclone on a server and let it run automatically, its great and easy

First, it says "use claude code to use rclone." It's very simple English, yet it directly contradicts your claim that "you're not even using Claude code to run rclone for you."

> Because that's the only way I'd understand someone to go on such rant.

Yeah, no wonder given the above.

Going back to the original comment, it says it's easy. Easier than not using Claude Code, which is typing `rclone copy <source> .`. Every justification that you pulled out of thin air is more complicated than that.

> Is this what you'd do?

Again, you're not reading. Read my original comment. And the reply to your comment. I wouldn't use Claude Code in this situation. I'd just type `rclone copy <source> .`.

Comment by subscribed 2 days ago

Right, I see, so when there's an opportunity for a rant you get one specific, narrow meaning, discarding anything else, even if more relevant and sensible, and then you go off.

Maybe try Claude Code one day, then you'll recognise what that phrase was actually about.

All the best! You must need it with such attitude to life.

Comment by soraminazuki 2 days ago

You literally made a bunch of things up and directly contradicted the statement you so vehemently defended. That's not "sensible," and pointing that out is very different from word lawyering. No amount of "trying Claude Code" will compensate for that.

Just calm down. You seem to be personally offended at the mere suggestion that Claude Code isn't a good fit for everything, or that it's not even more trustworthy than Google. That's just a fact, not a "rant." If you feel the impulse to throw a tantrum because of that, I genuinely urge you to revisit your relationship with your cloud subscription because it's definitely not healthy for you, or the people around you.

Comment by kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3 days ago

I tried Immich, but it doesn't play well with multiple users and external storage.

I've had limited success with Memories on Nextcloud.

Comment by the_real_cher 4 days ago

I use Immmich plus Tailscale.

Chefs kiss

Comment by Terr_ 3 days ago

That's on my someday-list. Immich through its rootless-docker configuration impressed me, but I've still gotta get around to figuring how I can provide access to family members. (I mean, I could buy some suitable hardware that isn't my desktop, but prices these days, amirite?)

Comment by AlphaJack 3 days ago

You don't really need a new homelab, a used mini pc will do just fine. For me Immich idles at 0.1% on consumer CPU consuming less than 3GB of RAM: - server: 1.40GB - postgresql: 600MB - machine learning: 125MB - valkey: 25MB This is for around 200k photos and videos. Mounting the thumbnails folder on an SSD should also help with load speed

Comment by brendoelfrendo 3 days ago

I run it on a Raspberry Pi 4B. External SSD for storage, runs like a champ.

Comment by Gigachad 3 days ago

Immich is not heavy. I bought an old mini pc from a second hand government office supplies website and it runs all my self hosted apps perfect with tons of room to spare.

I think the main thing is storage speed matters which is why a mini pc with an ssd runs circles around a raspberry pi running off a microsd card.

Comment by cyberax 3 days ago

I hosted Immich on an 8-year-old Intel NUC. It worked faster than Google Photos locally.

Comment by jmathai 3 days ago

Same. It’s been set and forget for me.

Comment by yreg 3 days ago

Immich is fantastic.

Comment by gschizas 3 days ago

I haven't found setting up Immich to be super easy. But I have a special setup at home (Windows Server with minikube). I've been wanting to try it for some time though.

Maybe I should rope some NAS for just the Immich setup.

Comment by fletchowns 3 days ago

Windows Server with minikube seems like an unusual combination. I am guessing you would have a better experience self-hosting stuff with Linux (Debian) & Docker. Running Immich on that is fairly painless. Once you're familiar with that, then decide if something like k8s is right for you. Unless you're already happy with your minikube setup for other apps, and there was something specific you ran into with Immich?

Comment by mceachen 3 days ago

I wrote the open source library that Immich (and PhotoStructure and several thousand other projects) use for metadata reads and writes.

PhotoStructure runs everywhere (laptops, desktops, macOS, Windows and Linux), libraries are portable across machines and OSes, there's a generous, usable free tier, and setup takes about three minutes. If you have any questions hop into our discord, we're a friendly bunch.

Comment by boplicity 3 days ago

takeout rarely works. Usually fails partway through the export.

Comment by philsnow 3 days ago

Export to google drive, use rclone to copy it out of google drive. Much, much more robust.

The multi-day wait while they prepare the takeout for download, though... I have forgotten about more takeout exports than I have actually downloaded.

Comment by kennyadam 3 days ago

Not my experience at all. As part of my job, I’ve used takeout to export the data from hundreds of accounts, with total sizes ranging from <1GB to >500GB, without any issues. I genuinely can’t remember a time that it has failed.

Comment by akkartik 3 days ago

I can relate. I often have to try multiple times with ~800GB of data. I still want to get out though, if only to not reward bad Takeout experience.

Comment by jimmydddd 3 days ago

Does Takeout work if you have say 1K or maybe 2K photos?

Comment by drusepth 3 days ago

I have nearly 600GB of photos in it and regularly do Takeouts every year or so. It takes a while and the format isn't that great (it's a ton of separate zip files), but it does eventually work.

Comment by kwanbix 3 days ago

Unless I am mis remembering, it generated about 200 or more ZIP files that you have to download one by one.

Comment by odo1242 3 days ago

You can set the max file size per ZIP file to 50GB instead of 2GB, then it will only generate 7 zip files

Comment by kwanbix 3 days ago

Thanks. It seems to be new that option. I am doing it right now.

Comment by mceachen 3 days ago

You can switch to tgz which supports 50gb splits.

Comment by 3 days ago

Comment by JumpCrisscross 3 days ago

Turn it off here: https://google.com/search-personalization

Comment by quicksnap 3 days ago

it's funny, I keep turning these options off, and then they go add more!

Comment by accrual 4 days ago

"might" === "absolutely will", just for the record.

Comment by javcasas 4 days ago

No. You mean "we are already using, but before you notice..."

Comment by accrual 4 days ago

Oh absolutely. By the time it becomes "do you accept <terms>?" It's actually "we already did this, can you confirm your consent?"

If you say no, the secret is "we already did it".

Comment by GeekyBear 4 days ago

They didn't allow unlimited cloud photo storage for all those years out of the goodness of their hearts.

That was all used as training data.

Comment by nonfamous 3 days ago

That was also the reason why Google Voice was created and still exists today. An unlimited supply of voice data.

Comment by zmmmmm 4 days ago

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.

Comment by josephg 4 days ago

> 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.

Comment by Gigachad 3 days ago

The Google idea of consent is “Yes”, “Ask me again every day until it’s yes”

Comment by bastawhiz 4 days ago

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.

Comment by szundi 4 days ago

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.

Comment by keeda 4 days ago

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.)

Comment by malfist 3 days ago

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

Comment by rhamzeh 4 days ago

> 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?

Comment by 4 days ago

Comment by shevy-java 4 days ago

Why the attempt to whitewash Google here?

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.

Comment by onel 3 days ago

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

Comment by soraminazuki 3 days ago

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.

Comment by jonhohle 4 days ago

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.

Comment by 3 days ago

Comment by bitpush 3 days ago

Google PMs catching strays lol.

Is it that easy at these companies to change policies like these?

Comment by aucisson_masque 4 days ago

I don’t see how it’s more reasonable. Google constantly nags you to accept terms and conditions to get things to work.

Most likely you will agree to share it with “other Google services” just by setting up an Android phone.

Comment by NoahZuniga 4 days ago

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.

Comment by alvah 3 days ago

Even that is a lie, from the formerly Don't Be Evil company. "choose to" != "have to opt out in multiple places not to".

Comment by 4 days ago

Comment by ziiinq 4 days ago

which is /opt out/ - Several opt outs in fact. Which would also disable most of gmail features, in particular spam filtering and categorization.

i know because i went through this.

Comment by preommr 4 days ago

something something boiling the frog

Comment by kmod 4 days ago

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.

Comment by yalogin 4 days ago

If anything I am surprised they haven’t done this till now. When they gave no option to opt out of having our Gemini chats to not be used for training it was clear Google took a turn to be bold and aggressive about using user data. It was the sign to move away

Comment by Gigachad 3 days ago

I pulled all of my data out of google at the start of the AI boom because I just new google is so hungry for training data they will take anything they can get their hands on.

So far Immich + Tailscale has been a dream.

Comment by yalogin 3 days ago

I have been trying to find a good solution for photos but never came across this. I will look into this

Comment by hilbert42 4 days ago

All I can add is that I'm very glad that I've no Google accounts nor use its services even though I've an Android phone.

Comment by munk-a 4 days ago

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.

Comment by Terr_ 3 days ago

> 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.

Comment by chneu 3 days ago

Caring about privacy and using discord is kind of weird.

Discord is speed running how to be a garbage company.

Comment by weird-eye-issue 3 days ago

You can thank all of the disposable email services

Comment by lstodd 3 days ago

bullshit. you can thank discord and ditch it.

Comment by weird-eye-issue 3 days ago

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

Comment by lstodd 3 days ago

You can not offload fraud and abuse on 'oh well there are so many new domains'. This is bullshit.

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.

Comment by weird-eye-issue 3 days ago

I never said blocking domains is the right way to go. But I can't blame them either. You don't know the type of fraud and abuse they have been seeing

Comment by lstodd 3 days ago

Oh believe me I do. (know the type of fraud and abuse they have been seeing).

Comment by weird-eye-issue 3 days ago

You don't even know what service they are talking about and you confused it with Discord as a whole earlier

Comment by TFNA 3 days ago

You are also very lucky. There are countries where all mainstream banks (i.e. the ones that can give you the whole range of everyday banking services) require an app from Play Store, with Play Services as a hard dependency to even launch, for online banking.

Comment by mentalgear 3 days ago

e/OS uses mircoG to make 98% of those bank apps work, GrapheneOS uses a sandbox for them.

Comment by TFNA 3 days ago

MicroG downloads code from Google and runs it unsandboxed (which is why GrapheneOS devs criticize MicroG so). That counts as using Google services. And even if GrapheneOS sandboxes Play Services, getting and running one's apps that way still counts as using Google services.

Comment by benoau 4 days ago

> Google won’t show you ads based on sensitive categories like race, sexual orientation, religion, or health.

Conspicuously absent from the "sensitive categories" is political leanings...

Comment by pureagave 4 days ago

In the future political leanings won't be used for ads. They will be used for something far worse.

Comment by SlightlyLeftPad 3 days ago

Attitude adjustments perhaps

Comment by Razengan 3 days ago

Reeducation

Comment by 1718627440 2 days ago

Deceptive ads can be very effective for reeducation though.

Comment by rmunn 3 days ago

They were already using Google Drive and/or Docs data for ad targeting.

How do I know?

In 2023 I decided to lose some weight. I created a Google Docs spreadsheet titled "Weight 2023" and every day, added one line to it. I did not do a bunch of Google searching for weight-loss products or exercise machines, I didn't suddenly start buying supplements on Amazon; the only change I made to my online habits was to open a spreadsheet and access it every day, to track my daily weight and see whether my new exercise-more-and-eat-less routine was working.

Suddenly I started getting Play Store "recommendations" on my phone for fitness-tracking apps, weight-loss calculator apps, and so on. I had never gotten such recommendations before.

That's when I realized that yes, Google could tell what I was doing from the title of my spreadsheet and the fact that I added one line to it every day.

Comment by Cidan 3 days ago

This is probably wrong.

What's more likely is you had people in your proximity that you did talk this to, be it work, school, in your home, or even at a random coffee shop. Google (and Meta) can hone in on your trends and habits so easily and so quickly, they'll know what you are going to do before you even do it. This is possible because they have a very deep understanding of social groups with billions of humans in the network.

You're just not as unique as you think you are.

Comment by chneu 3 days ago

Its probably correct.

An ex of mine said one day she might want to get into mountain biking, off handedly.

So I setup a spreadsheet comparing some equipment. Immediately I got hit with mountain biking ads. Like, within hours YouTube started showing me channels about mountain biking. Ads on other sites were now centered on mountain biking.

Why this matters? I purposely obfuscate my tracking data. So Google really glomps onto changes and it gets very obvious when the algorithm gets new information. I've used it as an example when showing people how invasive Google's data harvesting is.

One time I took a bunch of photos and videos then shared them with a person at a talk via Google Photos. Within minutes the content of those photos was a recommended video on YouTube.

Google is absolutely harvesting data across entire Google accounts. There is plenty of evidence of it. Also, this is expected behavior from an advertising company. I have no idea why people defend Google.

Comment by rmunn 2 days ago

I only ever browse Youtube in an incognito window, and to watch a video I copy its URL, yt-dlp it, and play it with VLC. I do similar things with other sites likely to track me: I tend to open them in incognito windows. (Which, of course, doesn't make it impossible to track me, just harder). So they have some data on me — it's impossible to hide your every move from the Google panopticon — but a lot less than with most people.

So yes, just as with your example, it was pretty obvious when the targeting algorithm acquired new data.

Comment by rmunn 2 days ago

Your assumptions are giving me a mental image of who you are as a person: that you're the kind of person who likes to talk to others about their plans. (That's not a negative statement, just a personality assessment — which, of course, could be wrong). But I'm not like that. I'm a fairly private person (I don't have a Facebook or Twitter account, for example) and I hadn't been talking to people about my plans. I just decided hey, I've been trying to exercise more for a while now, let's actually track whether it's doing me any good.

Comment by Morromist 3 days ago

Man that sucks. I gotta get my stuff out of google docs. Does anyone know of a good alternative?

Comment by privacyishuman 4 days ago

Ente Photos is the best alternative imo. It's super polished, lets you self-host, and is E2EE.

Comment by prism56 3 days ago

I concur, they know their target market too.

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.

Comment by bitpush 3 days ago

If you self host, why does it matter if it is E2E? What's your threat model?

What you need is encryption at rest yes?

Comment by prism56 3 days ago

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.

Comment by privacyishuman 3 days ago

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.

Comment by flowerthoughts 3 days ago

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.

Where are your E2EE keys?

Comment by bluesnowmonkey 4 days ago

Jokes on them, I don't see ads anymore. I even have ads stripped out of podcasts I listen to.

Comment by wuschel 4 days ago

Curious - how, if I may ask?

Comment by chneu 3 days ago

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.

It isnt automated but it gets rid if most ads.

Comment by xnx 4 days ago

Can't speak for the parent, but they may be using: https://github.com/podly-pure-podcasts/podly_pure_podcasts . I couldn't figure out how to get that working on Windows so I rolled my own: podcast-dl + parakeet + Gemini.

Comment by jwrallie 3 days ago

You can sometimes also support your podcast creators on Patreon and get ad free RSS feeds.

Comment by ecommerceguy 4 days ago

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.

Comment by ButlerianJihad 3 days ago

I welcome more targeted and personalized ads. I always leave this option enabled. The reason is that this personalization gives the user a good signal about what the company knows about us already. If we start seeing ads for certain things, then we know that topic has been incorporated as a data point from the data they have collected.

Personalized ads can often be uncomfortable or embarrassing, but anyone who disables this feature should remember that you're only denying signals to yourself.

Comment by chneu 3 days ago

You're giving them explicit permission to spy on you.

And you're labeling it as a benefit.

Comment by ButlerianJihad 3 days ago

No you don’t get it.

They are collecting the information, whether or not you opt-out of personalization.

I am giving them permission to show me what they know about me.

If you opt-out, then you are consenting for them to hide what they know, and only hide it from you.

Isn’t that the worse of two options?

Comment by ChrisArchitect 4 days ago

Source: https://www.androidauthority.com/google-personal-intelligenc...

Comment by amelius 4 days ago

Advertising is the root of all evil.

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.

...

Comment by jonhohle 3 days ago

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.

Comment by Terr_ 3 days ago

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.

Comment by Razengan 3 days ago

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..

Comment by BLKNSLVR 4 days ago

100%

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.

Comment by chneu 3 days ago

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.

Comment by xtracto 3 days ago

The Gmail man!

https://youtu.be/oR4jTvxPruw?si=CMtmM5_irok8qUBe

Comment by jms703 3 days ago

They weren't already?!

Comment by genghisjahn 3 days ago

when gmail launched in 2004, they did indeed target ads based on email content. People did not like it. Apparently in 2017 they ended "the practice." But now, about 10 years later, it's back?

https://privacyrights.org/resources-tools/archives/googles-n...

https://www.securityweek.com/google-stops-scanning-gmail-con...

Comment by bionhoward 4 days ago

Google privacy policy is an absolute joke so this is hardly surprising. Pretty much everything gets used for model training. It’s hard to find options that respect your privacy without studying 50 support docs pages. Plus they conflate anonymization with privacy, as if ripping off someone’s data becomes OK as long as you … take their name off em

Comment by mandeepj 4 days ago

Gmail has already been targeted from day 1!

Comment by changoplatanero 4 days ago

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.

Comment by fooqux 4 days ago

> but major retailers stopped providing that in email to limit how much info google could observe.

What makes you believe that was their motivation?

Comment by alwa 3 days ago

Contemporary reporting in the WSJ:

https://archive.is/xjSZA

Though it seems Yahoo was the more aggressive offender

Comment by Terr_ 3 days ago

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.

Comment by pixel_popping 3 days ago

Why wouldn't they do that already, why would they refuse to process B$ equivalent of data? The data are in cleartext in their DB and no one can verify, I would come from the assumption that it's already the case, their current ToS are irrelevant.

Comment by varispeed 4 days ago

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.

Comment by jsw97 3 days ago

Given that “don’t be evil” featured prominently in their S-1, does this constitute securities fraud?

Comment by mbrochh 1 day ago

Just use Ente.io I have been using it for 2 years now and am happy.

Comment by TutleCpt 3 days ago

I just assume that everything you put into Google is used for ads.

Comment by ErroneousBosh 4 days ago

Awesome.

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.

Comment by BLKNSLVR 4 days ago

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.

Comment by 4 days ago

Comment by akomtu 3 days ago

The implication here is that all your emails in GMail will be thoroughly analysed by LLMs.

Comment by shevy-java 4 days ago

Anyone surprised?

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.

Comment by torben-friis 4 days ago

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.

Comment by Terr_ 3 days ago

But what digital ad-agency will agree to carry those ads? :P

Comment by bitpush 3 days ago

You do realize all companies, including the most "moral" companies advertise - like Apple?

Comment by adamtaylor_13 4 days ago

You've gotta be able to actually show me ads before you can target me with ads.

Comment by palata 3 days ago

I am extremely surprised, because I thought Google was already doing that.

Comment by calmbonsai 3 days ago

Just de-Google yourself and your family. It’s long past time.

Comment by epsteingpt 3 days ago

Went in the training data, now they can't undo it.

Comment by krunck 4 days ago

I dumped Google years ago because I saw this, among other enshitification, was inevitable. Never looked back. Life is good.

Comment by Muhammad523 4 days ago

I also dumped google long time ago, i was around 12

Comment by noncoml 4 days ago

What do you use for email?

Comment by throwaway81523 4 days ago

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.

Comment by wahern 4 days ago

GMail has a 25-30% share of the client market.

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.

Comment by warkdarrior 4 days ago

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.

Comment by wafflemaker 4 days ago

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.

Comment by adiM 4 days ago

How does that help in preventing Google from profiling you?

Comment by frizlab 4 days ago

That’s, to put it plainly, dumb.

Comment by msm_ 4 days ago

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.

Comment by markburns 3 days ago

I think they are being more factual than fatalistic. You just differ by definition of “use Gmail”.

They are saying you are using Gmail when you communicate with someone on Gmail.

Comment by black_knight 4 days ago

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.

Comment by palata 3 days ago

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.

Comment by heikkilevanto 4 days ago

ProtonMail, FastMail, self-hosted...

Comment by platevoltage 4 days ago

If I could use ProtonMail with my mail client without a weird bridge application, I would have switched a long time ago.

Comment by Rebelgecko 4 days ago

Why not standardize on a single solution instead of maintaining your own stack AND paying for someone else to do the work?

Comment by xigoi 4 days ago

Purelymail. Really cheap, just works and doesn’t get in my way.

https://purelymail.com/

Comment by chneu 3 days ago

Purelymail rules.

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.

Comment by xigoi 3 days ago

TIL that Purelymail supports DAV. When was that added?

Comment by petepete 4 days ago

I've been on Purelymail since last December and I can't recommend it enough. It does exactly what I want in the way I expect it to.

Comment by jonhohle 3 days ago

How does Purelymail compare to Migadu?

Comment by xigoi 2 days ago

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.

Comment by bamboozled 4 days ago

I just pay for it like any other service.

Comment by Doctor_Fegg 4 days ago

Runbox with my own domain (which I've had since 1999). Support is great, prices are reasonable.

Comment by frizlab 4 days ago

Fastmail. They are good.

Comment by mportela 4 days ago

I'm using Proton. Never had an issue with them.

Comment by noncoml 4 days ago

Do you emails land on the inbox when the recipient is on gmail? Or do they go to spam?

Comment by cowlevel 4 days ago

Tuta

Comment by hardlianotion 3 days ago

Good job I never use it then.

Comment by sleight42 3 days ago

̶D̶o̶n̶'̶t̶ be evil

Comment by sippingabonedry 4 days ago

Friendly reminder when you click a link in a Gmail message, Google's servers also make a separate HTTP request for that link.

For your safety I'm sure.

Comment by bitpush 3 days ago

Why do they need to even do that? They already know the link from the email body. This is some urban myth.

If it is for click tracking there are far efficient ways to do that.

Comment by chiefwilsion 3 days ago

targeted ads are fine if they are actually relevant

Comment by 3 days ago

Comment by jsemrau 4 days ago

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.

Comment by imnotr0b0t 3 days ago

All of this so predictable and so disappointing. But there’s nothing to do but accept it.

Comment by improgrammer007 3 days ago

So? what's the harm? At least I'll see targeted ads; ads that I would actually care about and not random ads. Yeah, these big tech companies track us. It's old now. When the product is free, you are the product. Same old, same old. Tell me something new.

Comment by lstodd 3 days ago

As if it did not for all those years.

srsly ppl

Comment by cowlevel 4 days ago

Google's always done this, it's the entire reason Gmail exists. Now they're just saying it.

Comment by ViktorRay 4 days ago

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.

Comment by slyrus 4 days ago

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.

Comment by warkdarrior 4 days ago

Giving up (aka cynicism) is easy.

Comment by ForHackernews 4 days ago

On the contrary, it seems like giving up Google is hard for many people.

Comment by jjulius 4 days ago

Giving up on Google and moving away from them is the way.

Comment by cowlevel 4 days ago

What's the evidence they stopped?

Comment by Haranrk 4 days ago

Information meta has on me - instagram reel viewing data

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

Comment by cowlevel 3 days ago

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.

Comment by bensyverson 3 days ago

The best evidence is just how comically bad their ad targeting is vs Meta

Comment by bensyverson 3 days ago

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.