Google’s Gemini team is apparently sending out emails about an upcoming change to how Gemini interacts with apps on Android devices. The email informs users that, come July 7, 2025, Gemini will be able to “help you use Phone, Messages, WhatsApp, and Utilities on your phone, whether your Gemini Apps Activity is on or off.” Naturally, this has raised some privacy concerns among those who’ve received the email and those using the AI assistant on their Android devices.
Dear tech bros,
We, the people, don’t want to use your AI shit. Please stop shoving it down our throats. Thank you.
Sincerely,
-The people
The problem is there’s a fair amount of tech CEOs that insist this is the future and everyone needs to hop on which between the hype train, the amount of software peeps out of a job because of layoffs and the amount of snake oils salesmen out of a job because this eats google’s lunch this bubble is just ballooning. You have a lot of people hitching on this bandwagon hoping to sell shovels to the next gold rush.
And for awhile everything is just gonna get shittier.
But the AI people that the tech bros can now create outnumber real people by ♾️:1. The opinions of real people have ceased to matter even the tiny amount that they once did. So open wide and try not to gag.
You don’t want to use it.
The companies keep preloading it on new tech, updating old tech so its there, preventing the option from disabling it from even being there, and disabling tech that can’t use it.
This. Shit. Can. Fuck. All. The. Way. Off!
Laughs in eu
Laughs in degoogled android
Cries in non-eu, non-degoogled android
I swear all of this was predicted to happen by open source advocates of the 80s and they’d be called alarmists/whatever and then 30 years later you had Snowden leaks and all the surveillance bills and now Microsoft, Google, and Apple are all advertisement companies mining data through the software and devices they sell
The best people can do is just keep using and advocating for Linux adoption. Try out degoogled Android or a more traditional Linux phone device. Need more users and funding to get the software kinks worked out. They’re not as good as the high end Android and Apple stuff, but it’s a process
I’ve been struggling with figuring out how to get google off my phone. I don’t know if I’m doing a bad job of searching or if I’m just dumb, but are there any good communities in Lemmy you can recommend on the topic?
Just searched degoogle in Lemmy
https://lemmy.world/c/degoogle@lemmy.ml
There are levels to it. The advanced level is using a custom Android ROM for your phone that has no Google play services/apps on it and that’ll depend on what’s available for your phone from community ROM makers. You can see if any of these support your phone or plan any future phone of yours around these
https://itsfoss.com/android-distributions-roms/
An easier first step is just starting with non-Google apps. You can start with replacing Google apps like replace Maps with Organic Maps or something similar. Replace Gmail with something like Proton Mail. Same with calendar and cloud storage. Proton has alternatives. They even have an okay Google docs feature. Use a different search engine like duckduckgo rather than Google.
F-droid as an app store. Instead of Google authenticator use Aegis. Instead of Chrome use Firefox or a fork of it.
It’s difficult so a process over time of lessening dependency on Google applications
But what about banking apps and surch?
That is an issue that I imagine only being solved with a larger user base that banks don’t feel like they can ignore anymore
As the other guy mentioned, the website. All these apps are usually web wrappers anyways or some sort of cross platform software dev framework that does web/mobile so the website is usually pretty much the same as the apps
I’ve been Android and Windows user for pretty much all of my life. Vehemently anti Apple because of the company and I’ve thought the products are trash. I’ve been 100% Linux for over a year and a half, and if this Gemini stuff comes through, I will not have an android phone either. I have a Pixel and my old still functional Pixel. I need to try installing grapheneOS or something else and trial it to see if it will work for me.
If Linux isn’t an option for me in the future for whatever reason, I will be purchasing a Mac. I will never have a Windows machine for the rest of my life if I have any say in the matter, work being the obvious and uncontrollable exception. The fact that I’m even entertaining the idea of owning an iPhone or a Mac is really telling about how far Android and Windows and enshitified.
The user experience of GrapheneOS is basically the same as vanilla Android, except that you have more control (you can uninstall google apps, for example), but at the cost of a small minority of apps (banking ones, for example) not working (out of the box, sometimes at all). My banking app works, and a quick google search will tell you if yours does too. If your old pixel is not too old (4 is no longer supported, 8 definitely is, not sure abt in between), you should give it a go. I think you’ll see it’s not as big of a step as you maybe currently imagine.
My old one is a 6, so I think it should be supported. I really just need to bite the bullet and do it.
Gemini can be disabled. Uninstall/disable the Gemini app if your phone has it then go to Settings > Apps > Default apps > digital assistant > Google > none.
I do have it disabled, but this article suggests that it will ignore that and it will be integrated in apps that I really really don’t want it in. I could stomach it if it was search and other functionality like that only, or even if it 100% ran local with no ability to phone home and train on my data, but it doesn’t. Not that it can be listening to calls, reading messages, etc, I’m definitely hard out.
Re-read the article. All this feature does is give you the ability to say ‘set a timer for 10 minutes’ or ‘start a phone call to John’.
If you have ‘Gemini apps activity’ off then they won’t use anything you say to train their models.
There is a clarification from Google in he article that I don’t believe was there when I first posted. It still by default allows Gemini to have access to things I don’t want it to access, which is anything. It can be blocked through the Gemini apps activity, but I don’t think that was clear in the OG text.
None the less, they claim that it will be completely offline and that no information will be used to train their models. I believe that’s probably true in the short term, but I don’t trust them as far as I can throw them, and I’ve got fucked up shoulders. I’ve little doubt that they will change policy in 6 months to a year so that some data is sent anonymously.
I just want it so if I say don’t allow this thing at all, ever, that stays true and they don’t make me later opt out of that thing.
I think the article is misunderstanding what is happening (though to be clear I think the email is at fault for that). Google is making it so that app developers can integrate Gemini better by allowing Gemini to interact with those apps. There is a menu inside Gemini where you can switch these interactions on and off (Inside Gemini, click your profile in the upper right corner and press apps in the menu).
I’m assuming from the email that this will be enabled by default which is a choice they’ve made and which absolutely could be argued as invasive. That being said you’d actively have to use Gemini and have it be active on your phone in order for it to interact with those apps.
Assuming Google records whatever you do on your phone whenever you do those things, which many privacy minded people of course legitimately worry about and feel uncomfortable with to various degrees, this is not really anything but another way for your assistant to do more things. If they want to read your stuff that’s not really dependent on a switch in the Gemini app.
So if you have Gemini entirely disabled I don’t think this is relevant. Only if you actively seek to use it and do not want it to be able to integrate with external applications will these settings be relevant to you.
Not liking Apple for ethical reasons is one thing, but thinking they don’t make good products surprises me. I think the current generation of MacBooks are some of the best computers ever sold.
I should rephrase. They don’t make cheap bad products. I think iOS, Mac OS, and their walled garden approach makes their hardware a bad product. Compound that with being exorbitantly expensive for what you get, and that’s always been too much to overcome for me to support. Now they are/have becoming the less bad option.
I was never a “Mac” person. But I took the leap to escape windows with the Mac studio ultra. I use video and photo edit tools a lot. Used my existing peripheral devices. Expensive but the most silent and powerful machine I’ve ever owned. Software is my only complaint at times but I’ll live with it. I’ll definitely continue down M series for my main device.
In context of the larger thread, I need to figure out how to get graphene on my current phone. I nerfed the AI crap Samsung was forcing on me. But who knows if I got everything. I’ll assume I didn’t. Fdroid or graphene… That’s my summer project.
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Same, I’ve always been android and windows and heavily anti-apple
It’s like people have completely forgotten what Apple was like before the iPhone
I don’t know if I’ve ever really been pro-Microsoft, they had just been what gave me the freedom to get the job done. I even had a Windows CE phone back in the day, because it worked.
When Microsoft started monetizing every little thing and became outright hostile with its users is when I made the switch to Linux, the learning curve was steep but it didn’t take very long to get a handle on it
Early on I think I made the mistake of trying to hurry to get a windows experience out of Linux when I should have started where I started with Microsoft, at the command prompt
I used DOS for a long time before Windows 3.1 was even on the scene. Thinking back, even when I was using Windows at first, I was always finding myself bringing up a command prompt to do things.
Linux brings back some of that nostalgia, but it is so incredibly more capable and customizable than windows
Apple isn’t gonna have your back on this either you minds well run to foss forever if this is gonna be your Hill to die on
For sure, as long as that’s a viable option for me, I’ll do it, but if I don’t have that option…
If you don’t then I’d probably still rock android just for the increase in options it gives me
Saying “You’re not alone” is supposed to be a wholesome thing to show someone that you care. Instead, it’s AI companies squeezing as much data out of customers and injecting as much AI into everything they can.
Society really took a wrong turn didn’t it?
Society really took a wrong turn didn’t it?
Society has been circling the drain since the invention of agriculture…
Gemini depends on the Google app, disable it, and it dies.
Have you noticed how the Google app, the one that supposedly just does search and list news articles, has like 400 MB? Over time it accumulated 2GB cache… how?
Pls break Google up. Kthx
Let’s not stop at Google. Break them all up!
I don’t have Gemini loaded to my phone and I have Google assistant voice command disabled
But a few days ago I was having a conversation with my son next to me on the couch with my phone sitting on the arm of the couch.
When I asked him a question, gemini answered with a prompt on the screen I have never seen before and haven’t since.
It still creeps me out
I looked up what the prompt for gemini is supposed to lol like and this looked nothing like that. It looked more like a popup dialogue box from a browser but the only browser I use is opera and it is set as default
Yeah a couple of weeks ago Google secretly activated Gemini on every Pixel user’s phone. I ran into the same problem, my phone suddenly activated and Gemini popped up interrupting a song that I was playing while I was away from my phone. Ended up screwing up the song and having it repeat over and over and over.
Remember when Google+ was the future?
I’ve not received any mails or notifications. Though I don’t use Gemini at all. Or Google Assistant. Or any assistant.
This has got to be a prank.
Every new stupid implementation of AI feels like a prank.
Can’t you just delete Gemini with Canta?
is gemini on all androids? i remember there once was something called bixby, now when i accidentally hold the home button for too long it tells me to enable “circle”. i’ve disabled all of those “smart” features but fuck knows what is going to get automatically installed in an update next week
so this has got me looking at alternative OSs, but it’s all a bit confusing. which one is most mature and would still let me run android apps (I want my bank apps and stuff like that) but is also somewhat de-googled? I appreciate any advice
So it’s still Your device not Gemini device. I’ll wait couple of years.
