This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Why is it never the other way around? I’m sick of EULA updates silently enrolling me into things i never asked for
They are asking for legal trouble anyway, at least in Europe
And we’ll just watch them either get slapped by an insignificant fine, or watch them weasel their way out of this again, by claiming they made you agree to some perpetual abandonment of rights, like they always do
Or pay a fine of half a billion or so, but only 15 years later
it says you need to have smart features on for this to work. I went looking for how to turn it off, but aparently in the EU, UK, Japan and others it's off by default
Plus the options are frequently hidden and unclear.
I thought disabling One Drive on my Windows machine would keep it from syncing to the cloud. Nope, it just changed where the files were stored but Windows copies it to One Drive even when One Drive isn't running.
In the case of google, I assume that turning off the Gemini bullshit doesn't have any impact on it copying all the content to their servers even if you don't see it happening.
but Windows copies it to One Drive even when One Drive isn't running.
I don't understand why users and our justice system let them get away with this. This is malicious. Your operating system is literally literally malware. It does not respect your choices and it steals your information.
to shove it in people's faces who would never go out of their way to turn it on. probably like 99% of people.
Maybe the even more important question: Why can you even opt out? Why is this not done on-device, without anything going anywhere to begin with?
I mean, I know the answer, you know the answer, everyone knows the answer. If this was truly privacy preserving, there would be no need to opt out.
A single message now generates 20 different summaries and analyses, requiring a rack of GPUs and a diesel generator.
We're so lucky that electricity is unlimited and free, otherwise it might've caused a serious problem.
Most email is short. I don't see a need to summarize it. Google is run by idiots and assholes.
Ai will write complicated long mails, you'll need an Ai to summarise it
If an email needs to be summarized, I'm not going to read it anyway.
Eat more AI! We’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars on this fucking garbage, so EAT IT! Yeah! It’s in your email! It’s in your car! IT’S IN YOUR TEETH (launch date: Q2 2026)!
You jest, but I've already seen "AI-powered" toothbrushes on shelves. Let's give even more health data to corporate giants!
You go ahead and waste resources on summarizing the 200 emails a day in my spam account, you fucking morons.
It's so weird that we have to go through hoops and loops to get rid of this stuff! I was sick of my Android responding to a long press of the power button, meant to shut it down, with a Gemini prompt. Took me an hour to figure out I can't get rid of the function, but I can switch back (for now) to old style Google Assistant.
If you have to force functionality down your users' throat despite them not wanting it, you already lost. Gemini is Google's Clippy, just less iconic and more also-ran.
If you have to force functionality down your users' throat despite them not wanting it, you already lost.
As much as I'd like to think so, they're not stupid, they know what they're doing. They cram it in your face to make sure you know it's there. And most people don't care.
How the hell can they even afford that?! There are so many Gmail users and so many emails a second and Gemini will summarize them all? That sounds so expensive and like a waste of resources
It is, but the bubble mustn't burst or the grifters will stop making money selling "the end of skilled labor" to braindead capitalists.
Google makes a lot of money, and summarising stuff uses a surprisingly small amount of energy. You can do it trivially on-device on a laptop and on plenty of phones.
When it comes to LLMs, training the models is generally the thing that requires ridiculous amounts of energy.
This is dumb as fuck, though. I don't want Google's LLM to miss out critical details in my emails. That shit could be important. If people want this they should opt in.
buy domain
buy hosting
get email
use thunderbird
I run my own email and I have to say I wouldn't recommend it.
The biggest hassle is dealing with either Spamhaus or Microsoft, who apparently at random decide to put my IPs on blacklist, and who provide hurdles to working around this (for Spamhaus) or just say "no" (for Microsoft).
More opt outs... Everyone, just opt out of big tech
We should opt into little tech. A guy in Venezuela just trying to buy a couple days food will read your email and summarize it for you!
Ok this is the first step where I feel an actual urge to look for Gmail alternatives. (Been a Gmail user since like 2007.) I'm a desktop-only Gmail user, but I can see where this is going... :/ Also heavy user of Google Drive and Sheets, so it's going to be annoying if I have to replace all of them :/
So this is why I got an email that was completely wrong.
I told a guy I used to work for that I moved and it’s the perfect place to help him and his company.
He replied that he hopes I found a house where I used to live.
wtf it’s like he never read the email at all, now that this AI trash was added, the email makes sense.
I guess he is fucked and doesn’t get the help he needs for his company.
In reply to all of the complaints here: I've never seen anything about Gemini on my Graphene OS device. 🤷♂️
But your recipient uses it.
Exactly.
Communication with people is hard enough already without an LLM deciding what parts are important.
Idiots using LLMs to write emails to people using LLMs to summarise them. It's just slop all the way down.
Cool, how do I disable this shit feature?
Stop using the shit service.
Turned off by default in EEA, UK, Japan and Switzerland, for anyone interested (had to login to find out).
End users: To access Gemini summary cards, users need to have smart features and personalization smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet and smart features in Google Workspace turned on. Visit the Help Center to learn more about collaborating with Gemini in Gmail.
Sounds like it's an opt in, what am I missing
FWIW I use Fastmail and it works great.
And that's why I set up forwarding from Gmail and Outlook to my new Tuta account.
In a few months I should be free, happily paying for EU alternative were the default swipe gesture stands for delete instead of archive.
Forwarding in itself doesn’t do shit as they still have your mail
But yea if you want to avoid Google's website that’s nice I guess
I would also use a mail alias service so you get more privacy and can switch mail host whenever you want
buy a computer
put my data in there
computer computes my data too much
FUCK
Would opting out actually do anything except keep you from using the feature? Pretty certainly they will still let the ai read your emails if there is any benefit to google in it, but you just wont be seeing the summary.
If you read the article, it says this only applies to people that already have premium google office stuff already. The 90% of people with regular gmail accounts aren't affected by this. For now at least.
