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richrichardsson

What's worse is if you have a Pixel phone then Gemini is completely useless without enabling this setting.

I had it switched off:

"Hey Google, remind me at 7pm <something>"

"OK, your reminder is set for 7pm"

Next day:

"Hey Google, why didn't you remind me at 7pm"

"I can't do anything with your phone unless you enable chat history."

WTAF!

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This was the case with Google Assistant too.

Google has this pattern of all or nothing approach.

Maps refuses to show your *current* location if you don't enable location accuracy i.e. if you won't allow it to spy on your WiFi or Bluetooth it refuses to show your current location at all. GPS, what's that?

We can disable notifications and even phone access but physical activity is the one permission that cannot be disabled for play services !?

Google apps have a lot of WTFs!

And the YouTube home page is blank if you have Watch History off. The recommendation algorithm still runs on the side bar of any video you watch, but the home page refuses to even show your subscriptions.

Yeah, this is just Google punishing people for not enabling their data harvesting.

There's no reason they can't have a mix of "this is popular in general" and "your subs and likes suggest you'd like this" on the front page - they just don't want people to disable watch history. They are required to offer that as an option, but they'll never stop pestering you about it.

I'm surprised they don't just store your watch history anyway , with the toggle option being "don't show me or people looking over my shoulder my watch history".

My watch history is set to 3 months. It used to constantly show things I had already seen. However eventually (years ago) I just don’t get repeats.

I have a whole add-on just to default/redirect me to my subscriptions page.

That could be seen as a feature.

That's actually a plus.

> And the YouTube home page is blank if you have Watch History off.

That one I do like. YouTube’s homepage (at least without an account and with history off) is a cesspool of uninteresting clickbait garbage so I’m glad to have it off. I do agree they seem to think of it as some kind of punishment¹, which makes it all the more satisfying that it works as I want it.

¹ It’s now entirely blank for me, but I remember when they started doing this (it wasn’t always the case) they showed a message that suggested not having a homepage was undesirable.

Agree, but it should at least show recent uploads from my subscription. It's stupid that I can visit "www.youtube.com" and not see a single video.

Welcome to monopoly where they get the free videos from the sheep and still order you around. Why has Youtube not been disrupted btw, everyone gave up or did VCs order it?

I have to say - I actually like this.

Imagine if you go to Google.com to do a web search, and it is a page full of recommendations on sites to visit. Would you want that?

The difference is that I'm subscribed to a variety of channels on YouTube. Yes, I do want to see their videos on the front page. That's what the Subscriptions page is doing anyway.

Yes, but what algorithm will it use to show videos from the channels you're subscribed to? Will you and everyone else agree with that choice of algorithm? The only one that makes sense is chronological. Anything else leads to similar problems as in the past.

Yes, why not? Chronological is infinitely better than a blank homepage.

I agree, but most people do not. A quite common complaint of Mastodon - even here on HN - is that chronological makes discovery difficult.

I find it hard to believe anyone prefers "no results" to "chronological results".

You know what makes discovery difficult? A blank page

It's no wtf. Google is an ad company so they want all your data to target ads at you.

People use Google everyday, block all ads, get extremely angry about Google's grubby advertising hands, and then when you tell them their are paid services like Kagi and Proton...."pay for this stuff? Nah, I have a right to it for free!"

Payment doesn't guarantee anything tho. We are right now in a thread about a paid product by Google still spying.

Yes, it's almost like a fairy tale where children are offered candy but then very bad things happen. Hansel und Gretel, etc. We should have known all along!

Continuing with your Hansel and Gretel metaphor, the first time the candy turned sour for me was Goog-411. It was a service (at least over here in the US) that allowed you to look up local businesses via voice prompts over a phone call. When the service was still active, calling 411 via a mobile phone had a per-call cost, so a free lookup service seemed great.

I found out later that Goog411 was created to primarily train on the voice prompts from the users of the service. Left a really bad taste.

> We can disable notifications and even phone access but physical activity is the one permission that cannot be disabled for play services !?

Sandboxed Play Services works on Grapheneos without physical activity so it's definitely not actually required by their services.

But I think they showed the best example of that behavior just recently: no AI, no Google search for students because search is "too integrated" with AI (https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2026/11/03/google-...)

I've just turned off location accuracy, google maps displayed a popup said results will be better if I turn it on, and after dismissing the popup it did use GPS to localize me with no issues.

GPS only navigation is really bad. Takes ages to get a lock, especially in bad weather.

There are though some more privacy friendly alternatives that I remember from playing with GrapheneOS settings.

Funny, it works just fine for cruise missiles.

And on phones. In my experience, a hot start fix (with up to date ephemeris) shouldn't take more than a couple seconds. Maybe you have a bad antenna.

I'm comparing 0 GPS assist with full assist. Takes a few seconds and another few for a proper lock. With assist it's kind of instant. But I'm close to Polar Circle, maybe it's less sats over the North Pole?

This will only work for a few weeks, after which the location will be missing entirely. (Which just makes it more obvious that this is an intended feature, not a bug.)

If true, what you described makes it sound exactly like a bug, not an intended feature.

A/B testing rules

Surely that approach is implemented to force people in to the all group.

Then again, anon YouTube no longer showing recommendations on the start page is what waned me off the website.

Last time I tried, Maps also refused to show a map at all, from anywhere if you didn't enable your location.

> Google has this pattern of all or nothing approach.

Call it what it is, please. User-hostile behaviour that compels you to turn their tracking on if you want to use any of the practically helpful services.

I'm a super privacy conscious person, and even I end up keeping many of these things on simply because I want to use for eg google assistant.

Worst part is that the history lives with your other gemini chats. So, "set timer for x" 85 times gets muddled into chats where I'm doing deep research.

Yeah, I am hugely annoyed by this. I kept paying for the subscription for a year and a half, but I think I will stop now, as I feel that the added value is very small in comparison to Claude Code or just using openrouter open models.

This is the most infuriating part. Complete bait and switch by bricking features of the phone I bought before Gemini for practically anything that used assistant.

They are not transparent about it either. Anything you link to it to enable basic functionality you had on device before gets them the ability to use it for not just training but ads and measurement.

This has been annoying me too, and I was getting pretty close to turning on chat history having forgotten why I disabled it.

Thanks for the reminder OP!

But don't worry, Gemini is nearly completely useless even if you do enable the setting.

Yeah its the worst. I reported it as a bug to them. Obviously ill never get a response

This is a risk issue. They need users to explicitly opt in or they risk user-data-related compliance suits. This has always been Google's problem, as an advertising company, and why they've taken so many seemingly awkward paths over the years with both Android & Cloud.

Or they could just not collect the data? Apple's assistant may suck, but it degrades gracefully if you don't grant it certain permissions.

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