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Google Starts Scanning All Your Photos As New Update Goes Live (www.forbes.com)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Google confirms its latest update can scan all your photos to “use actual images of you and your loved ones” in AI image generation. That means Gemini seeing who you know and what you do. You likely have tens or hundreds of thousands of photos. They’re all exposed if you update.

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[–] 26 points 4 months ago* (3 children)

That's a terrible article though and seems quite click-baity, it's hard to say what's going on just based on that.
It also says

We’re talking Personal Intelligence, Google’s latest AI upgrade path which lets users opt-in to connecting Google apps to Gemini.
If it's opt-in, it's fine, as long as the user knows what exactly they are opting in for.

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  • [–] 15 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Even when they say it's optional, it's never actually optional. They are always enabling it in the background and just preventing you from seeing that.

    But even if they actually did use an opt-in system properly, they would still only do that for like 6 months, and then in the next update you'd be forced to use it. And who can stop them? There is no alternative.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    No alternative? Immich and Ente are definitely an alternative Google Photos. It ain't that hard to degoogle these days.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    There are services and websites that literally won't let you change your email, so if you used gmail to sign up, you're stuck with that email.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    Never had a website or service deny an email change in my 25 years of being on the internet. But you can move all the other stuff to a different email and keep the ones you can't change on your gmail. Still a better choice than giving all your data to google.

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  • [–] 13 points 4 months ago*

    The way they are doing it is kind of sketchy though. They are replacing the old search functionality with Gemini and now if you click the search icon in Google photos it immediately pops up asking you to pick your own face. There's no option to skip this step, though you can still revert to the old search for now.

    The creepy part is that when they ask you to select your face, it's pretty clear they've already figured it out, because it's the first face they show you.

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