Google: We would never use your Gmail to target ads. Also Google: If you voluntarily pour your Gmail into our AI blender, whatever comes out may help target ads. Technically, we’re not reading your diary. We’re just selling billboards next to the therapist’s summary of it. Privacy by wordplay is still surveillance with better PR.

I'm out. Moving my family .... including my 81 year old parents to Proton. They can do it - we have already moved to signal .. no issues.

Imagine the day when you go to some web site and see a picture of your wife, with a caption saying something like, "isn't it time that you talked to your doctor about Viagra?" How about those pre video ads on YouTube with your dead grandma, telling you to consider cremation?

What does that really mean, to use your data for ad targeting? Can they use your pictures to generate an AI image of those you love?

I see lots of posts that it doesn't affect you because you're not on Google services. What about that friend who took pictures at last week's happy hour? Grandma sharing pictures of her favorite granddaughter with her pickle ball group? Unless you're a hermit, you can't stop the slow trickle of your personal data being sucked up and stored for generations. It's your data, where are the laws to protect it?

More unfiltered bullshit in inbox just means the remaining people will leave Gmail

It's almost like being allowed to move King to Checkmate or check or whatever. Chess, mofo.

Are they now just saying the quiet out loud?

Have fun. I moved to Proton years ago.

No Gmail, no cry

The only solution is to treat the Gmail address like the address you get from your ISP: Do not use it as your main address, and only use it to communicate with the service.

My Gmail address only exists in the Google universe. Only Google uses it to contact me and send me information and spam.

The only thing I did is setting up a forwarding rule to forward all mails to my actual mail address where I filter and sort the mails, so I don’t need to manually check Gmail but get preprocessed information only.

might? You mean to tell me it didn't already?

Fastmail for me.

Hot take: Honestly don't know why people care about this. The bigger problem is that they already have your data. Which means the government already has your data. Why do you care if they use it for advertising?

Ironically, the use of the wording "the personalization trap" in the article makes me think Gemini likely assisted in the writing. Gemini loves calling things traps.

I figure these headlines are a best interpreted as a repeating reminder to degoogle.

The hints have only increased in urgency over the past couple of decades, from "we might do marketing" to "we spy on you" to "we do genocide".

Anyway -- nothing special about this headline, but finally I acted upon it: 1-2-3 backups of my google-email/photo/drive archives and reduced my google accounts to an empty skeleton (while I figure out if there's still any third party services I've forgotten about reliant on that email address).

I'd mostly migrated away from google a decade ago, maybe I can dispose of this skeleton account by the end of the year.

Nothing new that Google read the Gmail content for personalized ads. Alphabet is an advertising company and surveillance advertising always was and is its business model.

Might be? Lol

It isnt already?

Isn't that why they made gmail?

Google, you stink, like the poop in my toilet! Flush it down, flush it down so disgusting! Google you are making me gag because of your horrible stench. Please remove yourself from the equation.

Good reminder to migrate to a paid mail service. Ideally something in your own country.

Google is an ad company.

They have found a new feature to offer to make people accept sharing more data.

This is exactly what they have done from the beginning. Same song, different verse.

I think the TLDR here is that it's only if you enable that Intelligence integration

People still use Google?