DSA?

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

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

/s

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)

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

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.

Immich is fantastic.

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

I've had limited success with Memories on Nextcloud.

I use Immmich plus Tailscale.

Chefs kiss

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

takeout rarely works. Usually fails partway through the export.

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.

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

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.)

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

Curious - how, if I may ask?

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...

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.

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.

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.

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..

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

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

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

What do you use for email?

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.

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.