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Google can now read your WhatsApp messages

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Re: Google can now read your WhatsApp messages

#201

Post by 93po »

thfuran wrote: post #143
93po wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

people didn't vote for shit, if they could vote they'd vote for no ads and no cost. companies like google destroyed this option on purpose. there is no reason why the vast majority of apps and services online can't be both free and ad free. if i look for tetris on the app store it's literally impossible to find a version that's both ad free and free of purchases despite the fact that i know there's at minimum 100 opt…

>there is no reason why the vast majority of apps and services online can't be both free and ad free You can give away software, but running a service costs money. P2p messaging can be free (and signal exists), but nothing like free and adless YouTube or Facebook is going to happen regardless whether google or meta do anything to prevent it.

there are tons of free mastadon servers that cost nothing to end users and perfectly capture the functionality of twitter/facebook/whatever. yes there is root cost at its core, but its distributed across people who volunteer to pay for it on smaller scales becasue they enjoy running those services.

agreed its trickier when its gets to stuff like youtube, but piracy being free and widely spread is an example of how its possible, just not well developed right now

there's also options where it's pay-as-you-go with stuff like bitcoin (e.g. i pay $0.01 to watch a video) where it's effectively free but on large scale does cover the costs of infra

Re: Google can now read your WhatsApp messages

#202

Post by Workaccount2 »

Barbing wrote: post #102
sega_sai wrote: post #56

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.

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.)

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.

Re: Google can now read your WhatsApp messages

#203

Post by drexlspivey »

dakiol wrote: post #173
Workaccount2 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because people collectively vote for the ad model over the subscription model.

I pay for 2 streaming services. They include annoying ads and the only way to avoid ads is, yeah to just pay more. No sense at all.

That makes perfect sense actually, you pay them half of the ad revenue to get rid of half the ads.

Re: Google can now read your WhatsApp messages

#204

Post by dilyevsky »

phalangion wrote: post #116
xandrius wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are those the only options? How about paying once, owning a specific version and that's it?

That works for software, but not as well for services like YouTube

Even for software practice has shown few are actually willing to pay hundreds to thousands for a lifetime license. And you still need to purchase service packs, etc

Re: Google can now read your WhatsApp messages

#205

Post by ajross »

sheepscreek wrote: post #195
Hizonner wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that Google would find it to be convenient for the line to be blurry doesn't mean that anybody looking at it in good faith sees the line as blurry.

Google is an advertising company. Apple is a consumer hardware company. Who would you trust more with your data? It’s that simple (irrespective of the ground truth, simply referring to the optics of it).

Google sells hardware and Apple sells ads, in great quantity in both cases. Not sure "it's that simple" at all.

Re: Google can now read your WhatsApp messages

#206

Post by thimabi »

sega_sai wrote: post #168
pretext-1 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another option although it requires using another account is using Gemini for Google Workspace.

Thanks for the suggestion! I actually see that Business Standard Google Workspace (for 1 user) that includes Gemini Access costs less than Gemini Pro subscription for an individual. I will give it a go.

But note that Gemini via Workspace doesn’t have all the features of Gemini Pro, and it is notoriously behind regular Gemini in terms of feature adoption. So far, there’s no access to Gemini CLI (paid separately) and no way to selectively delete chats, for instance.

Re: Google can now read your WhatsApp messages

#207

Post by Ajedi32 »

kccqzy wrote: post #82
Hizonner wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Gemini should be able to do with WhatsApp: Exactly and only what any other random app on the phone could do with WhatsApp, assuming that you have enabled that in exactly the way you would have to enable any other random app to do it. Google needs to not be abusing its position as the source of the OS to give its software special privilege to reach inside of third-party apps.

The line is blurry. Google is positioning Gemini not just as an app, but as a OS level feature. The OS can by definition reach into any third-app app to do anything it wants. I'll give some more examples of OS-level features in case it's not clear: copy/paste is an OS-level feature and it is designed to extract arbitrary text or content from third party apps (copy) and insert them into third party apps (paste); scree…

Making OS level features depend on an external cloud service is a rather dubious proposition in general. It feels a bit anti-competitive to me, if nothing else.

Re: Google can now read your WhatsApp messages

#209

Post by Henchman21 »

kccqzy wrote: post #122
hbn wrote: post #73

People have been clowning on Apple for being behind on the AI stuff and -- while I'd never defend how they promised a bunch of features in 2024, showed them in ads, and sold iPhones based on vaporware, but still haven't shipped most of the features -- I will say, I imagine a lot of the hold-up is because they realized how dangerous it is to start trusting AI with the sensitive data on your phone. It's probably not to…

No. It's well documented and reported that Apple's hold-up is because of technical incompetency.

I’ve not read this; do you have any links?

Re: Google can now read your WhatsApp messages

#210

Post by Ajedi32 »

sfn42 wrote: post #148
TeMPOraL wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the situation on Android is that other apps cannot do anything with WhatsApp, and there's fuck all you can do about it as a user. I shouldn't need Google special-casing Gemini to allow LLMs to interact with my messages. I should be able to wire up Tasker to WhatsApp on one end, and to OpenAI or Anthropic models of my choice via API calls on the other end. Alas, Android is basically like iPhone now, just…

If you give users a way to compromise their own security, scammers will find a way to make users compromise themselves.

Users always have a way to compromise their own security, and short of taking away their freedom completely (e.g. putting them in a mental hospital) that's not possible to fix.

Sacrificing human freedom in the name of security is a long, dark, and well-trodden path that I don't think we ought to venture down any further.

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