This is a ridiculous article. There is a setting that lets Gemini learn from your data. This is not a setting to control whether Gemini can access your messages at all. Switching that setting off is not saying no to letting it control your messages and calls. It’s saying no to letting it learn from them. There is another setting you can use to disable access entirely.
I got the notification from Google about that and that made me think that they really are now a bunch of assholes with a top big joint monopoly with Apple.
The notification indeed says that even if you turned everything off, they will allow themselves in your messages, especially WhatsApp messages that are not normally part of Google or Android. And even if it looks like that the option to disable that exist, they don't tell you about that in the notification. It looks like that you have no choice.
To be clear, what I mean by that is that they only say: If you don’t want to use these features, you can turn them off in the Apps settings page.
But what it means "in the Apps" settings page? Does it means a settings in each individual app that my prostitute itself to Gemini?and if yes, which exact apps should I go to, to do this manual process that I don't asked for?
Clickbait.
> Gemini now has a second set of toggles buried in its settings menu. You can go to Profile → Apps inside the Gemini app and manually disable access to Phone, Messages, WhatsApp, or Utilities. But these are turned on by default, even if you’ve disabled tracking in the past.
Can we say "enshAItification"?
I’m surprised by how much this article reads like an opinion piece even though it isn’t.
As generative AI becomes harder to ignore, broader in scope, and even more dominant as a business trend… the people whose jobs are to write about how generative AI affects our lives have just had enough. They’re smart enough to see the writing on the wall, and now they’re trying desperately to transfer that writing onto their pages.
What I didnt read is what Android version this applies to? I have no Gemini app on my Samsung Galaxy S10+
Can they just make my Android (Google) keyboard work? I use three languages, and the dictionaries for the languages other than English are missing basic conjugations. Can Gemini perhaps help me type the next word? I been waiting for years!
I have "App activity" off, so everything is already off by default
Sounds sus. Did anyone here get this notification?
Right now if activity tracking is off I think you can't even use Gemini to do stuff like set alarms so it's worse than Google Assistant with activity tracking off.
Since Google Assistant is going away I think this is an improvement for people who want to keep activity tracking off.
It would also be better if you could create calendar events from the web version of Gemini with activity tracking off so you aren't punished for not letting Google train Gemini on your data imo.
How the fuck is this going to fly in Europe with the data privacy laws?
This is why you don't have Google services on your phone, kids.
Brought to you by a GrapheneOS fanboy.
It looks like people need a new legislation to protect against such abuses.
You can't use gemini if you are not logged in into a google account.
This is one more good reason to never sign in on your android phone.
It's not as good as using graphene, but it's easier, less work, and you can't brick your phone.
The drawback, of course, is that you can't use your map, youtube or gmail account since signing in in any of those logs in the entire device.
But with microg, fdroid and aurora, it's very practical.
why WhatsApp?
Isn't this inevitable across all companies now? Apple will be doing this on their phones and devices. Facebook want to do this in your camera roll for media you've not shared with them. Microsoft are doing this in their OSs. This is the future.
99% of the user's won't care and will actually find benefit in this sort of thing.
Personally I hate it, the struggle for any sort of privacy just got a lot harder on phones for me. PC/laptop is easy, I use Linux. But for phone I need to either pay for expensive hardware and risk bricking it to install something like grapheneOS or buy cheap and disable all the Google stuff I can.
Weird that you can even say "no". Usually the options are "yes" and "keep asking this until I click yes by accident".