These big tech companies are so frustrating. Why does every single aspect of our digital lives need to be monitored? It’s like whack a mole trying to get the most basic of privacy.
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Maybe the problem is what you consider a privacy violation, other users consider a feature.
Don't act like your opinion is the only one that matters. You may not, but other people do care about their privacy.
"Here's the thing: Google promises that under normal circumstances, Gemini cannot read or summarize your WhatsApp messages. But, and this is a big but, with the "help" of the Google Assistant or the Utilities app, it may view your messages (including images), read and respond to your WhatsApp notifications, and more."
Doesn't matter what your opinion is on privacy, google doesn't give you the option to opt out. - "regardless of whether your Gemini Apps Activity is on or off."
I assume it's because I don't really browse for buyables unless I have the intent of buying something immediately. On a personal level, I fail entirely to understand the value proposition in web advertising.
> What Gemini can’t do with WhatsApp
> Read or summarize your messages
> Add or read images, gifs, or memes in your messages
> Add or play audio or videos in your messages
> Read or respond to WhatsApp notifications
Of course, it's possible neowin says Google is lying, but they'll need to come up with something better than "maybe something may happen in the future" if they're going to make these claims.
Contrast that certain TV dayparts saturated with subprime ads promoting Medicare scams and other offerings for people who can’t spend their own money on things except for an occasional ad for a car dealer because if people weren’t driving you’d have much less reason to call a personal injury lawyer.
Ad free tiers for Netflix and whatnot have the problem that people who won’t pay for ad free aren’t really worth advertising to.
Same with all those car and watch ads in magazines. It's not like regular people are constantly looking to buy a new car. But the brand must be etched into brains. Your neighbor must be reasonably convinced that people around him are on the same page regarding the prestige of a certain brand, else it's not worth spending on. So even if you can't afford whatever car model, the fact that you're aware that it's prestigious is already worth it.
This is somewhat weaker in personalized online ads because your neighbor can't know what ads you saw. Billboards and super bowl ads a much better for establishing common knowledge, but perhaps that's why influencer-based marketing is gaining ground. All followers know that all followers saw the embedded ad. Maybe they should introduce ads where it says "Your friend Joe Schmo watched the following ad:"
It's almost as if you don't remember the good old days when the NY Times sold you a physical newspaper...that was (and still is) stuffed with ads.
Of course, the easy solution is that nobody has conversations that might need privacy anymore; people can just always be in public persona mode. Hopefully we don’t end up with a society made up of inauthentic lonely people as a result.
Lately the folks at my gas station have hit me up for a conversation whenever I was looking at newspapers, usually it is about how shocking it is how little paper you get in local papers for $2.50 or more. There are the funnies and the DBA listings and front-page articles about some chain store that isn't in our town going out of business. They don't bother to send reporters to public meetings like they did 25 years ago, and if there is a local election you might have to wait 36 hours after the results are posted by the board of elections. (Used to be a reason why I bought a paper)
Contrast that to the N.Y. Times which costs $6 or so but is a beast in terms of size (small print too!) although I'd say a lot of the content is vacuous.
You can give away software, but running a service costs money. P2p messaging can be free (and signal exists), but nothing like free and adless YouTube or Facebook is going to happen regardless whether google or meta do anything to prevent it.
In fact, I don't believe the ad model would have gone away if everyone started paying for a subscription. The bottom tier would still be filled with ads.
Ideally, the market would solve this. The companies that are pushing annoying would lose customers to the companies that don't. But since we don't live in a ideal world, I honestly think regulations would be the only way. Something like "If a customer pays for subscription in any way, you can't show ads" - and then let the companies put a realistic price to their subscription tiers, which makes it worthwhile for them.
I don't see what people find so grating about having a ad-load/cost spectrum. Maybe it's just confusion about the billing model.
agreed its trickier when its gets to stuff like youtube, but piracy being free and widely spread is an example of how its possible, just not well developed right now
there's also options where it's pay-as-you-go with stuff like bitcoin (e.g. i pay $0.01 to watch a video) where it's effectively free but on large scale does cover the costs of infra
If someone is concerned with their privacy by this feature, then they can just not use it. If someone is concerned that someone else might use this feature on private communications they had with the user, then that person misunderstands privacy and needs to realize that once they communicate their remarks to some other party, their ability to control their privacy to their own standards goes out the window generally, and not just with AI apps.
Things require labor. Labor costs money. Ergo, people giving you stuff require money, somehow. A tetris clone requires so little labour, that a well-off person with too much time (ergo labor) on their hands can give you that for free, but that's not scalable for 99% of important stuff.
Because capitalism, they also require more money, YoY, than last year, meaning they can't just make a steady stream of profit. They need more profit every year.
Now, all this is of course an inevitable consequence of capitalism, but that's not a conversation anyone herre seems ready for.
And as you cite piracy as an alternative: that’s not "free" as in software, that’s "free" as in freeloading. Someone else is paying for it, just not you. That might work to fulfil your own needs, but it’s not a viable solution for business models.
This happens even when people pay for the products. See for instance the enshittification of streaming "ad free" services.
Printed newspaper ads were only the former (and an easily skippable version compared to tv), while this topic is mainly about the latter.
On the computer attached to my stereo YouTube offers recommendations for music videos from the likes of the Super Furry Animals [1], Kanye West [2], Brothers Johnson and such. Nice stuff, with solid support that I like it, never challenging, unlike the recommendations from my Plex server.
On another computer YouTube shows me videos about stereo equipment, sometimes video game music [3], and also of the genre "Why X sucks" where X could be private equity, "the economy", a movie studio, a video game studio, a fast food restaurant, a clothing brand, etc. I wonder why public sentiment about the economy is so bad despite inflation and unemployment numbers that aren't so bad and think, "How many people are watching these videos?"
Other people get nothing but blackpill incel hell.
Ben Bagdikian wrote a book The Information Machines in 1970 about how personalized news would be possible by 1980 that was quite prophetic and was influential to me when I found it almost 20 years ago. Only recently did I find The Effete Conspiracy, his next book, where he reveals how angry and bitter he was that the work that the media industry sponsored him to do for the RAND corporation was roundly rejected by media owners uninterested in investing in the future and introduced the true but unpopular model that newspapers have a left-wing bias because reporters are left-wing and a right-wing bias because the owners are right-wing.
[1] I get accused of being a furry but I'm not, really
[2] pre-Nazi
Since I can't remove ads by paying, I don't pay for a single subscription content service. The pirate sites have stuff the day it premiers, and there's no nonsense about shows split between services. Also the broken promise of being able to change language easily is actually available on those sites. I had to buy then return shin godzilla from prime video - 2 separate versions. Haven't bought or rented on there since. Also had more than one service saying my stuff is not hdcp compliant when it is. Buggy, laggy messes.
I know im a minority but there is money on the table I would gladly pay for a decent service.
my point with torrenting is that people offer their bandwidth for free without any real incentive to do so. if there was more systemic open source adoption and awareness of how systems like this work well when people make token donations (like with bandwidth) then i think we could be fine.