Hacker News Reader

Comment by zmmmmm | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.)

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

> 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?

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.

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.

Google PMs catching strays lol.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

something something boiling the frog

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com