Google has updated its privacy policy to allow personal information from Gmail, Google Photos, and Drive to potentially be used for targeted advertising, raising new questions about how the company handles users’ private data.
The change, which took effect on October 16, introduces a significant exception to Google’s previous promise that it would not use content from these services to personalize advertisements.
As first spotted by Android Authority, the updated policy specifically affects users who connect their personal information to Google’s AI-powered services, including Search and Gemini.
How long until this gets used as a reason to gaslight people into using the memory leak browser? 🤔
Reminder that Immich has basically all the features of Google Photos and more, and you can migrate fairly easily by doing a Google Takeout.
https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/migrating-google-photos-to-immich-via-takeout
Problem being that even a 4TB NAS costs almost 1000€ to buy or build… It’s painful.
Just looked and yeah, not far off when you buy new. An old PC with a couple of hard drives can do the trick, but obviously it’s more work to set up.
The used and refurb market is your friend.
For large capacity refurb enterprise-grade drives, I recommend serverpartdeals
I’ve had some good 16TB drives from there for a good few years and still kicking. They can be a little loud though. You can get 10TB drives for maybe €250.
A Synology 4-bay NAS can be bought second hand from eBay for about €200-€300. They aren’t very powerful but might be fine for Immich and pretty easy to use. Many come with some hard drives you can pawn off or get started with using a RAID config that means if one or two die you are fine. If the drives are second hand (not pro refurb) though do not pay more than 30% of retail price because who knows how long they will last.
Photos don’t take up that much space. Even 100 000 photos tends to take up less than 500GB. Video is much heavier, so if you’re a videographer you may struggle without reencoding.
❤️ You rock 🫶
and if you can’t selfhost, ente.io is also a good option. but it’s a different software.
There’s also hosted Immich options (although Ente is probably better in this case since it is ecrypted):
https://store.elfhosted.com/product/immich/ (although I don’t think I’d trust a service that appears to be 100% AI-generated).
I’ve been using PixelUnion for some time now to test if I actually am comfortable with deleting Google Photos and I’m pretty sure I’m about to pull the trigger. They’ve been fantastic.
I also tried Ente but I honestly do not like them. It would be ideal if Immich were E2E encrypted but for me the difference in quality is so big that I don’t mind them not being encrypted.
In my opinion it’s also the better option if you can self-host, it’s more mature than Immich.
The definition of vibe coding seems to be very flexible nowadays. It used to mean using AI to generate code without looking at the code (and being a programmer being optional as well).
But some people call any AI assistance vibe coding, which makes any discourse difficult. Because anyone can say “no it’s not” even though you are both in agreement about what’s happening, only because the term is being misused.
I think the new definition for letting AI do all the work is cuck coding (you just tell it what to do) and vibe coding stays more integrated and involved
It launched commercially in early 2021 so the base is definitely human coded
I also made a tool with my brother to share photos with others in a trip:
https://github.com/Linkee12/PhotoBin
You can create a temporary album available for 30days, and everybody can share, select what they want to save and export. You can also put it on a VPS because it’s E2E encrypted, the server doesn’t see your photos.
I love Immich and use it as my primary backup but I had been using Google Photos as my secondary backup (partially out of laziness to find a new offsite backup). Are there any other cheap photo hosts?
Is there an inbox wrapper I can use for gmail on android?
I know I know just switch to proton or whatever. I have, but sometimes I still get stuff from things I’ve connected to gmail that i I’ve forgotten about.
The gmail app on android is very ad heavy.
Just looking to access my gmail from a cleaner app.
Do you just mean an email client? Then fairmail or thunderbird
Yup thanks
Thunderbird
Just set gmail to auto-forward all mail to the address you actually use.
If you already switched to proton, you can add Gmail to it, there’s an option to add it.
One thing to note on this is that after a week, Google told me that my account might be compromised, severed the link between Gmail and my Proton account, and forced me to log back in to my Google account on my computer.
I reconnected to Proton and it did it again a couple weeks later. Not sure if it’s fixed. (or working as intended)
Gmail Forwarding is the old feature that just forwards mail, and that seems to work fine without ever kicking you off, it’s only Gmail Connection (which allows sending emails from your Proton mail and having them send from your Gmail address) that’s done it for me so far.
Posteo is a quality service.
So here’s an advertisement for an advertisement? Because that’s my gmail content.
Is this only some countries? I thought they legally had to email to inform you of changes to these policies where I live b
Wait… This is new? They didn’t do that already? Really? I though this was the whole business model which made Google so big.
What a great reminder to turn off all those trackers. Thanks Lemmy!
I was thinking what a great reminder to take pictures with a camera not a phone.
To listen to music with a music player that has physical memory not cloud.
To keep things separate and private that you want to keep to yourself.
“
Don’tBe Evil”There’s sevaral good reasons they scrapped that slogan again.
Moving to Ente? Or moving to Proton family? Mixed of both?
I also found out the reported Photos usage via Google profile is way undercounted. It shows i have 30 GB of photos. I just requested a checkout of all Photos and well… i need to download 120GB…
I think a lot of Pixel devices came with a promo where your photos don’t count toward your drive space. That’s also the case for me
Google using Gmail to target ads has been a thing since the launch, I remember the articles about it back in the day, and still got a Gmail since it was still soo much better than alternatives like Hotmail.
They stopped doing that in 2017. Until now.
Their own phrasing:
Google does not scan G Suite emails for the purposes of ad targeting
Sounds a lot like weasel wording to me. Could be they’re still scanning - for other pruposes. The article obviously does not clarify.
I’d rather they tell us all the data mining they do do.
Any sane person really still using Gmail?!
Most people, yeah
I switched to tuta.com since a couple years back, it’s been pretty good. The user experience is worse, but it’s a good trade-off.
But of course it’ll take many years until I’m able to get rid of my Gmail account completely. Especially since I’m using a Google phone, and my car needs a Google account since its OS is based on/integrated with Android. And some websites don’t allow changing your email address, so I dunno what to do about those.
What sort of lemmy-ass statement is this? Of course there are sane people using Gmail.
Huh. Shows you how cynical I am, I already thought they were doing this.
Fucking hell. Time to take all the photos down. It’s been at least a decade since a photo has been uploaded there, because I knew Google can’t be trusted and I disabled the automatic upload, just hadn’t taken the already uploaded images down. On top of that, for months I have been in the process of moving off gmail to Zoho Mail. Fuck Google.
Taking your photos down may not remove them from their dataset. If they really wanted to they could restore them for their dataset. You wouldn’t ever know.
Odd how these headlines always ramp up as Alphabet ( Google) approaches their quarterly earnings report.
