I wouldn’t be surprised if Alphabet has used data from all these sources all the time.
That’s actually the reason I don’t use gmail except for registering Android, or use google calender, or google search except occasionally. I have my youtube account separate from my Android, and I don’t allow any cloud services, like photo or any other storage or sync services.
The power Google can gain from using these things in combination is huge, just like Facebook influenced the 2016 US presidential election, Google/Alphabet could use this for both political and financial gains to an enormous degree, that would have been completely unheard of prior to Internet becoming widely used.
They explicitly stated that they do not.
They have a lot of rules around data control and privacy that are followed internally because the engineers care to toe the line of public statements.
I hate to burst your bubble, but Google lies.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/google-pay-155-million-settlements-over-location-tracking-2023-09-15/
For the last three decades, tech companies have been operating in a “Ask for forgiveness, not permission” mentality.
Microsoft didn’t get such a large monopoly by playing fair. Neither did Google, Amazon, Uber, etc.
They have always said one thing, the courts found it to be inaccurate, and then they go “Oops” and pay $500 million “cost of doing business” while making 1000+ billion.
Except you can have one account to cover all those Google services. Meaning it must be trivial for Alphabet/Google to do the same.
Just because your average engineer isn’t allowed to, doesn’t mean they can’t do it at “special requests”, like law enforcement or “research”.
To put it another way, it’s to much potential power to entrust with a single company.
Can’t wait for bard to join the google graveyard with stadia once the ai fad passes!
It’s already starting to, the AI groups of devs basically showed off an alpha to their CEOs, then those CEOs thought it’s game changing…while the devs were like “no it’s an alpha/pre-alpha and is really dumb”…but the CEOs rolled with it and are now finding how bad it is…so it’s been getting slowly dropped. It’s %100 a fad and has limited applications. It’s really cool tech and I have used it, but it’s not something that’s going to replace many people.
This is only true for generative and sumariziation systems that are directly consumer facing. Current AI systems have a myriad of applications for internal tooling and B2b type systems. At my work we’ve built a vast array of tools using all kinds of modern AI that have delighted our clients. Things that previously wouldn’t have been possible for the average small buisness like filling out patient information by voice.
People like to shit on AI because they think of the thing google search uses or ChatGPT but it really is changing the world just not all at once. There will be more consumer facing advencments but more than likely these will come in the forms of things like existing products that get augmented in some way to aid usability (AI tooling is fantastic at facilitating accessibility).
AI is never going away it is here to stay and it is continuing to grow and advance
I mean who doesn’t like a search engine that very convincingly and assertively lies to you? They all come off as very authoritative while also being so very wrong more often than not.
It’s %100 a fad and has limited applications. It’s really cool tech and I have used it, but it’s not something that’s going to replace many people.
You are you trying to convince? Lol the more I hear this the more it seems like projection. You say it to comfort yourself because you’re not certain that it will but you want it to be true.
The more it gets integrated into the ecosystems that enterprise corporations use the more it will replace people. Our Data Automation engineers are currently training an in house model on company data so you can ask if for anything from the accounting spreadsheets to when the next holiday is (accounting for ACLs of course, can have accounts receivable getting access to accounts payable.)
If you genuinely think it’s a fad you most likely don’t work in an industry where it has an application or use-case, yet.
I don’t know where you’re getting this information that it’s dying out because that’s just objectively untrue. Microsoft is probably pricing out AI model Saas E5 licensing as we speak, Bing chat just got an upgrade with Enterprise Tenants recently that supposedly safeguards your company data, this shit is not going anywhere no matter what lies you’re telling yourself. It’s not replacing human oversight anytime soon but it absolutely will reduce the amount of humans behind screens at virtually every company in the next decade.
Meanwhile new jobs will open up in AI specific integration as it inevitably becomes too much for Cloud and Data engineers to handle.
“siLlY gOoGle, iTs tHe nEXt cRyPtO” just shows how little you know about it. Probably because you work in a completely unrelated industry and get your information from websites that tell you what you want to hear. Meanwhile your attempt at using AI probably amounts to breaking it’s moral safety locks and then running out of ideas. If you worked in a field that AI is being used for, and know enough to lean on its ability to work through large data sets quickly while doing simple QA work to verify its information (which takes vastly less time than searching through all the data yourself) I guarantee you that you’d find it incredibly useful.
Why? I think it’s amazing. I fiddle with text-to-image and LLMs daily (running locally of course) and I find them to be very interesting.
Man I can’t wait to get 100% out of gmail.
Just curious- what exactly do you mean by that? Do you mean abandoning/trashing your google account, or do you mean also refusing to send email to gmail recipients?
Personally I’ve gone all the way. Ditching the Google acct was just the 1st step (which implies also ditching Google Playstore). Then I quit sending email to gmail & outlook recipients. Then I went further and do an MX lookup on all email addresses to verify whether a vanity address like bob@lastname.com resolves to google. This has made #email mostly dead to me.
I won’t stop sending to Google recipients. I have moved my email to Proton, but because of lacking search functionality there I have not yet migrated historic emails.
I’ve stopped using other Google services and deleted data except for Maps and YouTube. Maps I can probably get rid of. YouTube I’ll keep but may be able to use a more fake account.
What makes anyone think google didn’t have the access before anyway?
They did. Its not about that
Now you can throw in a boring pdf, into your drive, and have bard read it and summarize each chapter. For example.
I asked it to read a report i have written for school and summarize it and give mr a few pointers where i could improve it. It was nice and speedy.
Granted the report isnt super long.
Wonder how well it does on a 700 page pdf…
Me, who’s had a Gmail account as my main email for twenty plus years. 😞
I’ve been meaning to switch off of Google for months now, but never had the time to properly research what exactly that entails
I was primarily using Gmail and Youtube Music and the switch was fairly easy. Apple Music was a better replacement than the other competitors, and Proton Mail was super easy. Paying for both makes me “not the product, but an actual customer”. Forwarded Gmail to Proton in about 30 seconds, and replaced Chrome with Firefox. Duck Duck Go isn’t a “perfect” replacement for Google Search, but it’s good enough.
Proton looks pretty good, but all the paid Google services show that paying is not enough to be seen as “not the product, but an actual customer” these days.
It’s NOT a valid reason not to switch, but god that’s a dumb name for a product. Again, I don’t understand why I hate the name, but I do. Please help me.
Curious what you decide. I feel trapped. My Gmail has been my primary account for almost 20 years. With that kind of longevity, switching would be extremely disruptive.
When I did it I just forwarded my mails to the new service (fastmail) and changed mail address whenever a mail got forwarded in. When I didn’t receive a forwarded mail for a year or so I deleted my old mail and never looked back.
If you use a password manager this get easier though, since you can just lookup where the old mail is used.
I kept Gmail, but gradually switched over to proton. Eventually, year or two later, it’s full of emails I don’t glcare about. Start now and take it slow.
