XLE @ XLE @piefed.social

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Joined

3 wk. ago

To be fair, the article itself recommends it.

The messaging in the article is a bit mixed, which makes sense because it's trying to explain Google's intentionally confusing messaging, but I would like to highlight one thing:

Can you fully disable Gemini on Android? No, and that’s by design. While you can turn off activity tracking, revoke permissions, and even uninstall the Gemini app on some devices, Google is actively replacing its Assistant app with Gemini. By the end of 2025, Gemini will be the default...

If you use Android, you should not use its Assistant if you want to keep Google away from your data.

This applies whether Google calls it Gemini or not.

At least back when police were writing thousands of fake tickets, they were doing it manually...

https://www.jalopnik.com/connecticut-police-26000-fake-tickets-hide-racism-1850627875/

You basically have to go there to view the NSFW content, don't you? I looked around some server federation rules and it seems like most servers block that one's local communities. (It doesn't appear to be out of ill will for the server, as most of them still allow federation of non-NSFW communities... But I imagine it's a large chunk of data to federate with very little reward since most Lemmy servers are run on little more than donations, volunteer efforts, and fumes.)

I think this comment said it best:

This is an obvious, thinly-veiled advertisement for a company's services. It's widely known that ad companies track you everywhere by many mechanisms. This is why we use ad blockers of all sorts. This has nothing to do with DuckDuckGo, it's merely used as a vehicle to get clicks.

And a supplemental note from the DDG team themselves :

This title is highly misleading, implying that Google tracks DuckDuckGo searches directly, which isn’t true... please change it to be more accurate about Google analytics and other Google trackers on websites you may visit.

(copied from my response to the same post in a different community)

Well this is a Hotznplotzn post, which means OP doesn't give a damn about data collection by American companies... or anything, really, besides reminding us China Bad

What people are these? Are they real people? Do they have names or a money trail?

So... controlled by whom?

I think this comment said it best:

This is an obvious, thinly-veiled advertisement for a company's services. It's widely known that ad companies track you everywhere by many mechanisms. This is why we use ad blockers of all sorts. This has nothing to do with DuckDuckGo, it's merely used as a vehicle to get clicks.

And a supplemental note from the DDG team themselves :

This title is highly misleading, implying that Google tracks DuckDuckGo searches directly, which isn’t true... please change it to be more accurate about Google analytics and other Google trackers on websites you may visit.

This is genuinely disturbing.

A developer was planning on sneaking data collection into a product through a sketchy terms of service. That on its own should keep the app out of any marketplace.

The subsequent claim that the developer simply forgot to include this in the TOS doesn't get any extra sympathy from me. Funny the apology only appeared after the developer got caught with their pants down, isn't it?

That GitHub discussion seems to confirm it. The developers shutting down their extension immediately afterwards too just reeks of suspicious activity.

The version number for the extension in my browser (1.8.8) doesn't match the latest release that's visible on this otherwise public repository (1.8.0)

So presumably at some point "someone" "somewhere" modified or added some files to the source code of this extension out of public view... and then "somehow" got a hold of this dev account password or whatever which was subsequently used to surreptitiously push it to the chrome webstore...

Leveraged for anything from buying a plane ticket to large scale business decisions, Agentic AI holds the promise of adapting to a wide variety of applications to improve users’ productivity and effectiveness.

These AI agents are so successful that their value is still completely abstract and speculative, with no specific use cases in sight. Just imagine the possibilities yourself, because we sure can't.

There are web clipping tools - even open source ones - to help you with stuff like this.

Based on your other comments here, you should probably start organizing your tabs before your browser simply crashes.

A while ago, Alexa devices would actually process the stuff you said on your device. They disabled that for some reason. They need their cloud servers to waste more energy, I guess.

I'm surprised this article doesn't mention privacytests.org by name, but it reaches a conclusion that may as well:

If you see a dumb checklist trying to convince you to use a specific app or product, assume some marketing asshole is trying to manipulate you. Don’t trust it.

Thankfully there's a good recommendation in the very next paragraph for all things (messaging apps, browsers, etc):

If you’re confronted with a checklist in the wild and want an alternative to share instead, Privacy Guides doesn’t attempt to create comparison tables for all of their recommendations within a given category of tool.

Also: shots fired at XMPP throughout, as the poor protocol limps along trying desperately to catch up to the encryption baseline that was set over a decade ago by the first versions of Signal.

Ultimately, both protocols are good. They’re certainly way better choices than OpenPGP, OMEMO, Olm, MTProto, etc.

Why OMEMO is "bad" is indirectly answered earlier:

The most important questions that actually matter to security:

• Is end-to-end encryption turned on by default?
• Can you (accidentally, maliciously) turn it off?

If the answers aren’t “yes” and “no”, respectively, your app belongs in the garbage. Do not pass Go.

Similar discussions have skewered the federated Delta Chat for having an even worse version of this issue.

I wondered why this was downvoted before I saw the original message in my notifications

yeah, thanks Mr/Ms obvious, you described exactly the reason of why it does not look vanilla at all, that big giant bottom ad banner

Anyway, my point is that I would assume Firefox would look different if there was evidence the user caused this banner by accidentally injecting malware into the browser within Linux.

I hesitantly wonder if something like Perplexity might actually be the future of search engines. It seems relatively capable of correctly interpreting search queries full of half-remembered thoughts and potentially inaccurate text into salient results. I disregard the guestimations it makes about the links it provides (of course) but the couple of times I tried it out this way, it seemed to work better than Google.

I also wonder how much energy it requires compared to whatever trash Google returns.

Considering Google has put effort into intentionally worsening its own product, it makes sense that their chapel alternative would be something people just use.

What are the chances Mozilla will actually open source the deepfake text detector, which is literally the only part of the entire Fakespot portfolio that might be worth preserving?

ETA: here's FakeSpot failing spectacularly to identify an AI-generated book with phony, AI-generated reviews.