Notices tagged with google, page 3

This is why I use my own device instead of a company phone. Either way, this is not a good look for #Android work phones.

👉🏾 #Google Starts Sharing All Your Text Messages With Your Employer https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2025/12/02/google-starts-sharing-all-your-text-messages-with-your-employer/

#Android is dead and we’d better all leave the ship before it sinks entirely.

Earlier this year #Google already took bold steps in moving the development of several AOSP components behind closed doors, removing the open-source foundations of the project one component at the time.

Options to unlock bootloaders on Android devices are also narrowing down. Xiaomi removed the ability to unlock the bootloader entirely in MIUI in August (after months spent making it ridiculously difficult), same for OnePlus, Samsung did so in July, and probably Google devices will soon follow suit.

And let’s not mention the nightmare of the Play Integrity API that forces all Android developers to register through the Play Store and use Google’s signing keys, even if they don’t intend to distribute their apps through it.

Sure, officially Google has taken a step back and has pledged to provide a way for developers and power-users to bypass those restrictions. But we can all expect it to be a cumbersome and change-prone process filled with ridiculous amounts of frictions at every step - and I wouldn’t even expect such a morally bankrupt company to keep maintaining this “sideloading” option.

Google once competed with Apple for customers. But in a world where Google walks away from the biggest antitrust trial since 1998 with yet another slap on the wrist, competition is dead, and Google is taking notes from Apple about what they can legally get away with. And the EU, the biggest opposer of its anti-competitive acts, is also becoming softer with Big Tech - both because Vestager has left the job, and because being soft with trillion-dollar monopolist tech titans is seen as a sign of being “technologically competitive”.

Your best bet is to purchase a Pixel 9a now, before more manufacturers decide to block bootloaders, and immediately flash it with #GrapheneOS.

The long term plan would instead be to throw all of our efforts and energies on Linux phones. The folks at GrapheneOS are doing an amazing job and fighting against all kind of pressures, but at some point we should probably all just acknowledge that anything that is tainted with Android, or runs on a device intended only to run Android, is a liability, and we should no longer build solutions on top of hardware and software that we can no longer trust.

Sailfish, PostmarketOS, UBPorts, MeeGo or whatever comes next must succeed. No matter the cost.

I'm a Google Workspace admin, and a team member sent me a screenshot showing that a message they wanted to send was being blocked because it violated an organizational policy-- which was news to me-- I hadn't put in place to block messages based on their content.

Turns out Google Workspace now warns by default when the message content mentions gender identity.

#google #privacy #politics

Fresco: A plataformização da Educação Pública: a construção de políticas públicas através de redes de atores visíveis e invisíveis

Análise das políticas do #Google em Santa Catarina e relações de atores nacionais, locais e internacionais na construção da #plataformização. Vale a leitura!

https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/perspectiva/article/view/105685

This whole thread of #Google #AIIsGoingGreat with fractions is a good illustration of why I'm skeptical of the "sure, it has bugs, but they're fixing them, just like any other software" takes. IMO you can't band-aid a system with no concept of what fraction is to get this right in the general case, and even if you somehow recognize questions about fractions, there's an unlimited number of other cases where autocomplete is similarly inappropriate

https://mastodon.social/@lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/113771300586021845

O Google tá usando seus emails para treinar o Gemini?

Alerto logo que ñ confio na Google, ñ uso e aconselho ñ usar.

A Google diz que não está usando os emails e que pode ser verdade.

Mas nada a impede de fazer isso, mesmo que peçamos p/ não fazer.

E treinar IA não é a pior coisa que ela pode fazer com o acesso que tem aos emails.

Ou seja: não desativa nada, simplesmente mude para um serviço de email que te respeite.

https://lifehacker.com/tech/google-says-it-isnt-using-your-emails-to-train-its-ai

#IAgpt #privacidade #Gmail #Google

#Google denies ‘misleading’ reports of #Gmail using your emails to train #AI

https://www.theverge.com/news/826902/gmail-ai-training-data-opt-out

#privacy #Gemini

#NATO and #Google #Cloud Sign Multi-Million Dollar Deal for #AI-Enabled Sovereign Cloud - Nov 24, 2025
https://www.googlecloudpresscorner.com/2025-11-24-NATO-and-Google-Cloud-Sign-Multi-Million-Dollar-Deal-for-AI-Enabled-Sovereign-Cloud

More #digitalsovereignty is not possible two days after the summit. Sorry folks.

The only flavour of decentralisation there’s no room for at FOSDEM is the kind that won’t speak at a conference that allows itself to be sponsored by, and thereby whitewashes, a surveillance capitalist like Google that is complicit in Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.

https://progressive.international/wire/2025-08-26-un-calls-out-google-and-amazon-for-abetting-gaza-genocide/en

#FOSDEM #Google #israel #genocide #Gaza #Palestine #UN #BigTech #complicity #whitewashing #institutionalCorruption #PR #freeAsInGenocide https://mastodon.matrix.org/@matrix/115603969911396223

"Under the radar, Google has added features that allow Gmail to access all private messages and attachments for training its AI models.

If you use Gmail, you need to be aware of an important change that’s quietly rolling out. Reportedly, Google has recently started automatically opting users in to allow Gmail to access all private messages and attachments for training its AI models. This means your emails could be analyzed to improve Google’s AI assistants, like Smart Compose or AI-generated replies. Unless you decide to take action.

The reason behind this is Google’s push to power new Gmail features with its Gemini AI, helping you write emails faster and manage your inbox more efficiently. To do that, Google is using real email content, including attachments, to train and refine its AI models. Some users are now reporting that these settings are switched on by default instead of asking for explicit opt-in.

Which means that if you don’t manually turn these setting off, your private messages may be used for AI training behind the scenes. Even though Google promises strong privacy measures like anonymization and data security during AI training, for anyone handling sensitive or confidential information, that may not feel reassuring."

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/11/gmail-is-reading-your-emails-and-attachments-to-train-its-ai-unless-you-turn-it-off

#AI #GenerativeAI #Google #Gmail #Gemini

Computerworld: Will Apple block Google’s AirDrop Integration? https://www.computerworld.com/article/4094541/will-apple-block-googles-airdrop-integration.html @jonnyevans #Apple #Google

🚨 BREAKING #Google just activated #Gemini on #Gmail - without asking you.

Turn it off now; here's how!
https://tuta.com/blog/how-to-disable-gemini-on-android

✊️ Fight AI & fight Google

You have to manually turn off Smart Features in the Setting menu in TWO locations.

Share so everyone is aware. ❤️

Qué cabrones son los de #Google. Gmail lleva toda la vida ofreciendo la categorización a tus correos seccionando tu bandeja de entrada en 5 pestañas y ahora lo han metido con la IA forzado, de modo que para usar las categorías de la bandeja de entrada, hay que activar las funciones inteligentes.

¡¡Maldad pura y dura!! Te roban algo que era gratis. Es como si quitaran las reglas, la personalización de la firma o poder mandar a spam un correo y dijeran "uy, hace falta la IA para esto".

How does one check a checkbox in #google docs using the keyboard and a #screenReader, #NVDA in this case? Pressing space seems to just add a space within the list item and I think I've tried most ifn ot all other options at this point :)

So #Google’s AI Gemini is better than ChatGPT‽

👉🏾 I just tested #Gemini 3 vs #ChatGPT-5.1 — and one #AI crushed the competition https://www.tomsguide.com/ai/i-just-tested-gemini-3-vs-chatgpt-5-1-and-one-ai-crushed-the-competition

Ich stelle mal eine ganz steile These auf: #Apple schaut sich in Ruhe an, wie #Meta #OpenAI #Microsoft #Google und Co. Milliarden verbrennen (und den Planeten!) und sammelt dann die Scherben der AI-Blase auf!

Hier 👉 https://share.transistor.fm/s/5e1650dc gibt es alle Podcast-Links zur aktuellen #MeTacheles Folge!

Moin #Fediverse und euch einen gesunden Start in die neue Woche. Wie immer wuerde ich mich freuen, wenn ihr diese Ausgabe teilen koenntet.

Danke fuer euren Support 🙏

Lauren's Blog: Coding with Gemini: Cheerful, cooperative, and usually, wrong.

https://lauren.vortex.com/2025/11/14/coding-with-gemini

Another experiment in #AI coding with #Google Gemini. I try to be fair. When I call generative AI mostly slop, I don't do so blindly; I attempt to conduct reasonable tests in various contexts.

Yesterday I needed a couple of routines -- one in Bash, the other in Python. I tried the Python one first. This required code to asynchronously access a remote site API, authenticate, send and receive various data and process what was returned, relying on a well documented Python library on GitHub written specifically to deal with that site's API.

After almost two hours, I gave up. Gemini was consistently cheerful and cooperative -- almost to a creepy extent. It generated code that looked reasonable, was very well commented, and even provided helpful examples of how to configure, install, and run the code.

Unfortunately, none of it actually worked.

When I noted the problems, Gemini got oddly enthusiastic, with comments like "Wow, that's a great explanation of the problems, and a very useful error message! Let's figure out what's wrong! Here is another version with more diagnostics that accesses the library more directly!"

Sort of made me feel like I was dealing with an earnest but incompetent TA at an undergraduate CS course at UCLA long ago. Which was not something I enjoyed back then!

After a bunch of iterations, I gave up. Even starting over didn't help. Gemini never seemed to produce the same code twice, no matter how I worded the prompts. The code would use completely different models each time, sometimes embedded configuration values, sometimes external files, sometimes command line args. And the way it tried to use the Python library in question also varied enormously. It almost seemed random. Or at least pseudorandom.

I spent half an hour and wrote plus tested the code I needed from scratch. It worked on the second try, and was about half the number of lines of any of the code Gemini generated, and much simpler, for whatever that's worth. By comparison, Gemini's code was bloated and definitely unnecessarily complex (as well as wrong).

I did give Gemini another chance. I also needed a simple Bash script to do some date conversions. I offered that task to Gemini since I didn't want to bother digging through the various date format parameters required. Gemini came up with something reasonable for this in about four tries. Whether it's completely bug free I dunno for sure, I haven't dug into the code deeply since its not a critical application. But it seems to be working for now.

So really, I haven't seen a significant improvement in this area. There are probably some reasonable sets of problems where AI-coding can reduce some of the grunt work, but once you get into anything more complex the opportunities for errors, especially in larger chunks of code where detecting those errors might not be straightforward, seem to rise dramatically.

--Lauren--

Google is hosting a CBP app that uses facial recognition to identify immigrants, while simultaneously removing apps that report the location of ICE officials because Google sees ICE as a vulnerable group. “It is time to choose sides; fascism or morality? Big tech has made their choice.”

https://www.404media.co/google-has-chosen-a-side-in-trumps-mass-deportation-effort

#usa #uspol #technology #google

#Google #Android
Devant le tollé, Google ne va finalement pas interdire l'installation libre d'APK. Ouf !
https://sebsauvage.net/links/?26mFlQ

The death of #XSLT by the hand of #Google (again) is quite saddening.

To be clear, the last time I actively used XSLT was probably around 2010. But I still had an emotional attachment to this technology.

Maybe because one of the first bug reports I contributed to as a coder was this ancient Mozilla bug from 2001 which was about XSLT rendering (and btw it’s still open after 24 years, and since XSLT is now officially dead I don’t think it’ll ever be addressed).

Maybe it’s because one of the first iterations of my personal website relied heavily on XSLT.

My website back in 2007-2008 consisted in a bunch of XML files, which were rendered on the fly either as HTML or RSS feeds depending on the client. And XSLT was there operating this transformation behind the scenes.

I get it, the world doesn’t rely so heavy on XML as it did 15 years ago.

But HTML is a superset of XML. As those unloved RSS/Atom feeds are still XML.

XSLT provided the perfect glue to transform one into another with a (relatively) simple markup language. No boilerplate code required on your application to operate conversion for client presentation purposes. XML in, XML out, XML in between.

Back then, in the early days of jQuery, I used to dream of an XSLT-based solution to generate and reuse DOM components.

Imagine that: an alternative timeline where no React, Vue or 200MB node_modules for transpiling were required, and everything relied on XSLT to transparently transform whatever markup synctatic sugar your frontend framework used into valid HTML.

But I guess that, especially now that XSLT support has been removed for good from Web browsers, we’ve diverged from that timeline quite a bit.