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.
Remember when the entire selling point of Gmail was lots of storage and “no obtrusive ads like Yahoo Mail or Hotmail”? Pepperidge Farms remembers.
Google has turned its back on every single thing it use to stand for. Down to the “don’t be evil” slogan.
It really hasn’t. It’s always been a commercial outfit and it’s been true to that goal: make money. Consumers keep making fantastical stories about a titan of surveillance-capitalism though. It was financed via the CIA and it has been working with the USA’s intelligence-community from day dot. It hasn’t changed. It’s still Google and it will continue being Google.
I still miss the free unlimited 2mp backup for photos.
Turning that off topped off my storage and I’ve been over 90% ever since.
Targeted advertising should be illegal. Solves a lot of problems. You can pick an ad based on its location (sports.example.com can have sports ads and astrology.example.com star ads), but not based on who’s viewing it. Now there’s less motivation to read all your personal information.
Agreed, targeted advertising and collecting private information about a person and storing it should be illegal. Decentralized systems, cryptocurrency or tokenized payments, and ephemeral order data that is wiped immediately after fulfillment should be standard. The Internet should be privacy focused.
You ever tried to enforce the changes needed to stop all of that tracking on a small group of friends/family? The number of people that actually like it as long as the down sides are not put in there face is wild.
I don’t mean this as disagreement, just an interesting observation about people.
Yes! Or even just any limits on targeting granularity. Like “show ads for my nail salon to all the women in a 3 mile radius” seems fine. But “show this ad to women aged 33 who have 3 cats and who have been to Kohl’s twice in the last month and have watched at least 30 seconds of videos about Charlie Kirk” is just fucking insane, and they go even farther than that.
I mean yeah it’s the old way to serve ads but it’s incredibly inefficient. Even an example as broad as sports.com, ESPN+ might want to advertise but they only offer their service in the US. They don’t want to pay for impressions from users in France, so a minimum would be geo targeting based on IP.
When you get down to medium and small business, I could have some watches to sell to sports dudes, but my campaign budget is $10,000 so I would only target men 40+ because 20 year old college football fans can’t afford the product.
I don’t like the ad ecosystem but people generally don’t want to pay subscriptions for websites but like the publisher’s content. Publishers gotta get paid somehow.
TV and radio managed just fine for years without targeted ads. They targeted the ads based on the content. Saturday morning cartoons advertised toys and ceral. Daytime TV advertises medicare advantage plans for retirees. Country radio advertises white hoods or whatever.
Meanwhile, subscription services without ads also made money.
Targeted ads were never necessary. Outlaw them and the internet and media companies won’t disappear.
TV and Radio ads are somewhat targeted because at a minimum your location is known, either within the radio tower reach or the channels you have access to and/or geolocation your TV provider has access to.
Monday Night Football does not show the same ads in every region. Some are national and others are local, there is still some programattic at play. If you watch through a smart TV you’ll get CTV ads for sure.
A mix of both would be great. Something where your target your ads based on the content only, like the old days, and you don’t need to know your customers at all. Only what you guess they’re most likely to be interested in.
Put gaming ads on twitch streams, or pay a youtuber to be a sponsor. They’re plenty of ways to “target your ads” while not needing to gather all the information you can possibly gather on every single individual in the world
Yeah there’s a been a few attempts at “privacy preserving” user id hashing like Google Topics, ID5, and many more.
Publishers love private deals for ad spend, it’s just more work and can be inconsistent vs programmatic that is less revenue but always flowing.
You can still target ads based on location, but you do it through targeted content like they used to, which also g9ves us more diverse content.
When a local business wanted to put an ad out and didn’t want to go nationwide, they’d advertise in the local paper. Now they just pay Google to target people, which is why 90% of local news has died.
I mean yeah it’s the old way to serve ads but it’s incredibly inefficient.
Why do we have to make advertising efficient?
Personally I think advertising needs a LOT more regulation.
The entities paying for the advertising demand it. It could be untargeted but the conversion rate falls so the ROI of paying ads is less, leading to less to spend per campaign.
Publishers can show the untargeted ads but they get paid less per impression.
And that’s why it should be regulated heavily. Advertising uses scientifically backed methods to short circuit people’s judgement and drive consumerism.
I’ve already agreed the ads ecosystem sucks.
If you had it your way, small businesses could probably not afford to advertise online. It would only be businesses who could blanket the internet with their banners at mass scale without targeting.
We already have GDPR, TCF 2 and various other privacy frameworks and laws localized. What do you want to change?
I personally like publishers staying in businesses who produce valuable content.
If a website can tell what zip code you’re in based on IP, that’s good enough. If someone is using a VPN and their approximate location is obfuscated, the USER can choose to volunteer their location if they want localized ads.
Targeted advertising of any kind should be voluntary.
I also believe billboards should be taken down. Advertisers have been given carte blanche to hijack our eyes, ears, and attention without permission for far too long.
That’s kinda the point. If we can’t have economic growth without considering the humanistic aspect of it, then maybe we don’t deserve said economic growth.
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
and if you can’t selfhost, ente.io is also a good option. but it’s a different software.
There’s also managed 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.
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
In my opinion it’s also the better option if you can self-host, it’s more mature than Immich.
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.
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 🫶
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?
Users concerned about the latest privacy change can disconnect Gmail, Google Photos, and other connected apps from Personal Intelligence or disable Personalized Recommendations through their Google Account settings.
Most important part of the article.
Need a direct link or path… Going to hunt now.
Google account settings > data and privacy > Personalization settings > disable and delete all
I wonder if that will only stop the ads being personalized or the data collection will also stop. My bet is on the former, but I hope I’m wrong.
So glad I switched to immich
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.
UGH FINE ASSHOLES I’LL DEGOOGLE
gonna take me like 15 minutes this is outrageous
Anyone happen to have a large repository of butthole pictures I can borrow?
I use this one on grindr.
For what I do understand is that they will use your pictures to serve you targeted ads to what you are interested of, if that’s the case probably you’ll get ads about butthole bleaching
Oh, I don’t mind all that. As long as I get the pictures.
I too am very interested in this.
If you want to take back control of your data, there are open source alternatives to almost every Google product
this needs more visibility
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.
deleted by creator
“
Don’tBe Evil”
There’s a reason they scrapped that slogan again.
This is also why I don’t trust Brave either. Any company that profits off an ad network and can change the rules whenever they want is dangerous. Even if Brave doesn’t do it now, doesn’t mean they won’t.
I already have a different email address. I just need an alternative to Google drive, and Google docs then, I can bail on Google forever. I’m so tired of Google doing evil and privacy invasive shit.
Do you need the collaborative aspect of Google docs?
I use it for DnD a lot to take notes and share them with my group. Would be nice to find something with that functionality.
That’s tough because it means convincing everyone to switch to it, whatever it is. I’d give proton drive a whirl. If you’re mostly saving text documents, I don’t think the limitations of the free tiers should even be an issue.
Is protonmail the easiest switch from Gmail?
There are many options.
If you just want [email protected] there are several safe options.
If you want [email protected] there are different safe options.
I use the second option through Fastmail.com.
What about a good Google Photos alternative? Preferably something I can self-host. (Cloud storage is fine too, 1TB minimum, $15/mo max.) I’ve been wanting to DeGoogle for years but haven’t yet out of convenience.
Must have, no compromise features: A “Memories” feature that works as good as Google’s, and a search box that lets me find images by describing what’s in them.
Edit: Thanks for all the helpful replies. Looks like I have a lot of homework to do. Keep the suggestions coming.
Immich as recommended by a few others, and there’s also Nextcloud, but keep in mind Nextcloud is a little “heavier” in that it has more functions and features.
For example it can be used as a drive, calendar, contacts, notes, and photo alternative. Look into a addin for Nextcloud called memories that I personally like better than the native photo app.
I run both immich and Nextcloud, as well as a bunch of other alternatives to Google’s services.
Nextcloud is awful with photos. Loads slow, no useful features for photos. Otherwise it’s great but would go for immich any day when it comes to photos
I felt that nextcloud photos/memories was a bit lackluster compared to immich, but good news is, via community plugins you’re able to integrate immich into your nextcloud as if it were part of the suite and you get the best of both worlds.
Nextcloud for gdrive, office, email, todo lists, calendar, Spotify, a kanban board, budget tracker, and a simple notes option (personally I prefer obsidian w/ nc file sync and I might do tiny edits/touch ups in notes since it’s all markdown anyway)
Though I saw there’s a way to use obsidian gui through a docker container, so you COULD use the external links feature to have it also be accessible through nextcloud, which is tempting but its more fluff that I don’t feel like dealing with rn…
Fancy, hadn’t thought of that.
Are you talking about Nextcloud core, or specifically the Nextcloud Photos app?
Both actually
Immich allows search for text and objects in the photos, using integrated free, local-run small AI models. I haven’t used a memories feature but I believe one may have rolled out in the last update.
Honestly, Immich is a free self-host option and is incredibly close to Google Photos. I think if you’re holding out for exactly identical feature parity, though, you may never be satisfied.
I don’t know exactly what’s in the Google Photos memories, but immich absolutely has a memories with pictures on that day in previous years.
IDK. A lot of people like to self-host immich.
I use and android phone so this would be my next step on de-googling.
This repo exists solely to help you compare all the alternatives.
My quick look through the feature matrix, the best options (purely in terms of the number of features in the comparison) are Ente, Immich, and Nextcloud (there’s both Nextcloud Photos and Nextcloud Memories—I’m not sure how they work together vs separately). Unfortunately a “memories” feature isn’t in the feature matrix, but from a quick search I believe all the options I just named have it.
100% Immich. Really good UI, and the kinds of quality of life features you don’t normally find in smaller open source apps (auto face tagging, map based on coordinates of photos, built-in non-destructive editor, memories, etc)
The memories feature is mostly just “here’s photos/videos you took on this date”, but it doesn’t compile any sort of custom album based on a theme or place or anything like that. Not hard to do so yourself by just going to the map view and zooming into any location though.
As for image searching it does have that, and I’ve found it to be shockingly reliable even when I run it on just a Raspberry Pi. (though it can take a while to give you the result of your search if you’re on lower-end hardware like that)
The memories feature […] doesn’t compile any sort of custom album based on a theme or place or anything like that.
Damnit, you had me sold up until this part. I need the memories feature to work exactly how it does on GPhotos (or in a similar way). But I still have a lot of comment replies to sort through so I’m hopeful I’ll find the perfect replacement.
Maybe try Ente then?
Haven’t used it before myself, but I’ve heard good things, and it does have a memories feature, and it seems at least based on the examples on their website that it might generate something more than just “today x years ago”.
Unsure to what degree it works though, and unfortunately Ente is also a paid service (though it is privacy focused, and I believe it has a FOSS app too)
Seems like “Smart Memories” are on the roadmap for Immich though, so you might just have to wait a bit and can then switch once they’re there:
There aren’t really any other mature options out there for self hosted, or even just private Google Photos alternatives in my experience, so you’re kinda just stuck with Immich for the most feature-complete replacement, and Ente for a more “just works” private but not self-hosted one. Everything else is basically just a glorified file browser, but maybe with some smart searching or better media codec support.
Smart Memories sounds exactly like what I want so I’ll definitely check it out once the feature goes Gold. Thanks for doing the heavy lifting for me.
Seen Fastmail recommended before. Have you had any issues signing up for an account, where the site/service doesn’t recognize your email address/domain as a valid input because it’s not well known and therefore blocked. Only reason I opened a gmail again 💀, while I’m trying Tuta atm.
I was with fastmail for years. It was great, and the most sophisticated I’ve seen if you want that fancy web ui feel.
However, I found the pricing to be egregious for larger mailboxes.
Oh interesting, thanks for the info. Do they charge depending on how many emails you receive? If I’m understanding your last sentence right.
What are you using now?
No, you need to select a plan with enough storage quota.
If you store 10 years worth of emails for work, it gets super pricey.
I switched to mxroute. A no frills mail provider. great deliverability, but no web ui.
Ohh gotcha, thanks for the clarification, that makes sense! And thanks for sharing about mxroute, TIL.
no problems for me but I have a .net domain
Contact them. I’m sure they give you an answer.
It was a pretty straightforward switch. If you pay for Protonmail, you also get free email aliasing through pass mail, which is a massive privacy boost
Custom domain first, then chose your email provider.
I’m on protonmail now, but was on Zoho mail before.
My custom domain allows me to switch more easily, it took me literally 3 years to switch from @gmail.com, never again.
I would say if all you care about is having a nice looking, fully-featured, easy to use client, Proton is good, but if you really just need… an inbox with an email attached, then Tuta will be a little cheaper and just as private, just with less bells and whistles.
If you care about removing yourself from other services like calendars, cloud storage, password managers, etc, Proton is way better since it has the full suite.
For example, Proton supports auto-categorizing mail (e.g. newsletters, promotions, updates, transactions, etc), unlimited email aliases, a more modern UI, good integrations with Proton Drive and Proton Calendar if you decide to use those as well instead of Google Drive and Google Calendar, etc.
Tuta is more just an inbox that you can bother to sort as needed, comes with some aliases if you feel like it but probably not enough for every single online service you have, has a basic calendar, but doesn’t have any kind of integrated Drive access (is still in closed beta rn), and has a more… basic UI.
disroot and vivaldi is totally fine
Yes
