>Your Gmail and Instagram are training AI. There’s little you can do about it.
You can stop using those services.
>It’s your data.
As soon as you decide to upload it somewhere else, it's not.
You can stop using those services.
>It’s your data.
As soon as you decide to upload it somewhere else, it's not.
you do not under any circumstances actually need to use these services for them to use and collect data points on you.
Sure, it's all publicly available info, but I don't want services I haven't signed up for having my info without my consent. I don't like that my friends and family can just give them access to all of that data without me being involved in any way.
Still, it annoys me that most people probably have my personal email address, phone number and real name tied together as a contact and provide this information to at least one online platform. Back when I used to use Google and Android, I would try to preserve my contacts’ privacy by storing their names using some mixture of first name, nicknames, initial for surname and context, e.g., “Alan F”, “Fid”¹, “Alan (football)“, “John (work)“. I’d also keep their number and email address as separate contacts — though that might only have worked in the early to mid 2000s. At some point, Google started getting too clever at determining which contacts could be “merged”.
¹ short for Fidelma
I don't think that's true. Users could be allowed to enter addresses individuality or ideally, when apps ask for permissions to a person's contacts phones could allow users to select what the app can and cannot see (only certain contacts, or phone numbers but not email addresses, etc)
There are ways phones and apps could handle contact data while preserving privacy, but nobody is interested in helping people keep their data private. Phones are designed to leak your data like a sieve and apps are designed to collect every scrap of data they can get their hands on.
At some point things turn from you can avoid to they are ever present.
Kind of like avoiding cameras and license plate readers, you going to lock yourself in a hole and avoid people?
I cannot avoid every contact I have not using these services, unless I have no contacts. If whatever point you’re making is “who cares you can’t avoid it anyway,” that’s not only intellectually very lazy, it’s untrue - Lots of countries have regulated their way around these issues. The fact that one of the biggest producers of tech in the world (US) has this space fairly unregulated is not some excuse to capitulate to things that are fairly easy to regulate sensibly, if there is political will and knowledge. With uninformed takes like the parent I’m replying to still floating around out there, I guess it really is inevitable and unavoidable.
Even if you stop using Gmail, chances are that the other party is using Gmail. (Today even e-mail addresses with non-Gmail domains are often using Gmail behind their custom domain.) So, your emails go to train AI for Google even if you deliberately stopped using their service.
In any event, as the other poster mentioned, your original post claimed “You can…” and now you are moving to “You can’t” out of an apparent relish for being contrarian. This is not good-faith discussion on your part.
That may be how everyone is treating it but that isn’t the only or even the obvious way for it to be. Mailing something doesn’t give the mailing service a right to open and scan the contents of your letter, even if it could do so without damaging anything. Parking your car with a valet service does not grant the service the right to drive your car to make deliveries while you’re not using it. Sending photo film to be developed doesn’t give the developing service a right to make their own copies of it. And so on.
It’s not unreasonable for a user to think of their emailing something as just granting the mail service the minimal privileges necessary to transmit and deliver the message to the explicitly intended recipient.
But they can't stop using you.