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Google can now read your WhatsApp messages

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467 points bundie | 2 comments | 08 Jul 25 16:11 UTC | HN request time: 0.463s | source
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sega_sai ◴[08 Jul 25 17:24 UTC] No.44502108[source]▶
The whole situation with Gemini Apps Activity setting is so frustrating. Even if I pay for Gemini Pro, the only way to make sure there will be no human looking at your chats is to set Apps Activity to off, which means you don't have any history for Gemini chats, even for the messages from a minute ago.
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Barbing ◴[08 Jul 25 17:54 UTC] No.44502389[source]▶
Reminiscent of their heavy handed approach to disabling watch history on YouTube, even when paying for YouTube Premium.

(Google punishes viewers who make themselves less valuable to advertisers by giving them an entirely blank homepage.)

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Workaccount2 ◴[08 Jul 25 19:36 UTC] No.44503283[source]▶
Wouldn't a blank homepage be exactly what you expect if you had no tracking enabled? The algorithm that generates the homepage is probably totally stunted with only empty logs to draw on.
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michaelmrose ◴[08 Jul 25 19:50 UTC] No.44503402[source]▶
You could make a list of demographic fitted choices based on info on the user.

One wonders if you couldn't whip up something that would whip up a list of choices by operating locally only on the users history returning just a list of things to show on the page and forgetting it when the user closed the tab.

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1. Macha ◴[08 Jul 25 20:04 UTC] No.44503541[source]▶
Honestly having occasionally glimpsed the logged out YouTube page which appears to do this... I'm glad that I don't have to deal with that either.

As for what they should do, I think populating the homepage from the subscriptions list (either literally as an ordered list or by some algorithmic "watch time vs average watch time for this creator", I don't care) would be preferable.

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2. Barbing ◴[09 Jul 25 19:44 UTC] No.44514048[source]▶
Great idea!

If the goal were anything but discouraging disabling watch history, they’d take care to design a page not so strikingly barren.

Video categories, subscriptions, trending searches (not saying we’d WANT that), Google-curated selections, recommendations based on user choices (“what kinds of videos should we show you, want daily news/sportballs/music recs?”)