TechCrunch: If you use Google, you’re training its AI. Here’s how to opt out.. “Consider this a belated PSA: A recent change to Google’s privacy settings is allowing the company to store more of your data, including media such as ‘images, files, and audio and video recordings,’ to improve its AI models. In other words, if you upload any media to Google’s Search services, it’s being […]

#Phishing poses as big-brand job interview to steal #Google accounts

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/phishing-poses-as-big-brand-job-interview-to-steal-google-accounts/

#cybersecurity

If you use #Google, you’re training its #AI. Here’s how to opt out.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/06/if-you-use-google-youre-training-its-ai-heres-how-to-opt-out/

#privacy

Google may fucking suck, but... no. That's all I got. ☠️

"A #Google executive told an inquiry on Tuesday that a #YouTube video that falsely claimed a wounded survivor of an #antisemitic massacre in #Sydney was a #crisisactor blooded with makeup had met the platform’s standards and would remain online.

Google #Australia manager #RachelLord was testifying at a government inquiry into the spread of #antisemitism in Australia including an attack by two gunmen on a #Sydney #Hanukkah celebration in December that left 15 dead."

https://apnews.com/article/australia-antisemitic-massacre-inquiry-youtube-5b8b2bf01c13ce4d15a49605844161cc

#Email... "it was easier to #outsource to #Google."

Picture #AltText = #GoodOmens #series
#TerryPratchett + #NeilGaiman

#Quote text from @teledyn@mstdn.ca
@teledyn @teledyn@mastodon.coffee

Whole Post originally here:

https://mastodon.social/@teledyn@mstdn.ca/116800137675619974

Alt...

#GoodOmens #series #TerryPratchett + #NeilGaiman

In case you haven't heard yet, the European Court of Justice dismissed Google's appeal last week, which means that even if they tried to get away with it, they'll have to pay the €4.1 billion imposed by the European Commission in 2018. The lawsuit focused on Google abusing its dominance by requiring distributors of Android devices to bundle Google Search and Google Chrome.

This is why we don't stop at building a decent browser, but also go the extra mile and get involved in regulatory work. Having real choices it's crucial for a healthy market.

#BigTech #browser #Google #EuropeanCommission

#Meta conducted a secretive program that directed hundreds of contractors to pose as children while bombarding its competitors’ #AI models with disturbing prompts ranging from suicide to cannibalism.

Internally known as “#Cannes,” the project, run by Meta contractor #Covalen, targeted #OpenAI’s #ChatGPT, #Google’s #Gemini, and #Character.AI chatbots using throwaway under-18 accounts.

Prompts focused on suicide and self-harm, eating disorders, and sex or romance, all written from the perspective of a child.

Wanna know where some child porn is coming from? #Zuckerberg is building it in to every AI he can pay to touch.

Eat the rich. Kill the #AIs. #Luddite the data centers.
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-contractors-pretending-to-be-teens-chatbot-testing/

Have you ever imagined how the United States’ Declaration of Independence would have turned out if it were written with the help of AI? You don’t have to, now that Google is using a TV ad that does just that with “Group project, but make it 1776.” Read about it from @Techcrunch:

https://flip.it/-ZFkM9

#AI #Google #Tech

Google quietly removes the on-device AI privacy assurance from Chrome's Settings UI

Google has quietly removed the privacy assurance from Chrome's on-device AI Settings UI. The sentence promising that the model runs locally without sending data to Google's servers has been deleted, and the toggle moved out of the System block to reduce the chance the change is noticed. There are three plausible reasons for tha…

https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/google-quietly-removes-on-device-ai-privacy-claim

#ai #chrome #consent #compliance #eprivacy #gdpr #google

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Google quietly removes the on-device AI privacy assurance from Chrome's Settings UI

Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane.

Google Chrome is downloading a 4 GB Gemini Nano model onto users' machines without consent, with no opt-in, no opt-out short of enterprise tooling, and an automatic re-download every time the user deletes it. The pattern is…

https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chrome-silent-nano-install

#ai #privacy #eprivacy #compliance #gdpr #google #chrome #gemini #esg #environment #sustainability #climate #law

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Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane.

MakeUseOf: Google’s latest updates for Chrome extensions are a big boon for privacy. “On July 1, Google announced some significant changes to the Chrome Web Store’s policies. These changes will impact Chrome extensions in several key ways, but the primary focus is on enhancing user privacy.”

What We Talk About When We Talk About #Malware

https://f-droid.org/en/2026/07/01/adv-malware.html

#Android #Google #KeepAndroidOpen #privacy #cybersecurity #FOSS #FDroid

“Google’s power consumption rose by 7 TWh between 2023 and 2024. That was bad. But it rose by a whopping 12 TWh between 2024 and 2025, almost double last year’s increase. Google’s power consumption isn’t just growing – the rate at which it is growing is growing. We have a word for this: exponential growth.

Every time I look at this chart I have to go and double check every single Google number, because it just looks so ridiculous

The power grids that Google’s data centres are plugged into have to increase generation to match this new demand – and that includes rising use of coal and gas, and as a consequence, worse climate disasters like deadly heatwaves. Google’s consumption is rising way faster than the grids are being cleaned up with renewables, and that means their emissions number is going up fast, too. It’s the steepest rise on record:”

https://ketanjoshi.co/2026/07/01/googles-exponential-path-to-climate-wrecking-digital-bloat/

#Google #AI #DataCenters #Energy #ClimateChange

I switched to GrapheneOS a week ago.

So far, I am very happy with it. It was easy: the project is well documented, and it just looks like regular Android.

I use two profiles: one for Open Source apps, and one for the apps I unfortunately have to install through the Play Store.

#GrapheneOS #Degoogle #Google

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The GrapheneOS logo displayed on a phone, as it is booting up.

Due to the thirst of #GenAI, #Google is now consuming as much power as Aotearoa New Zealand! That's what people get through the continued push for slop machines.

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:66lbtw2porscqpmair6mir37/post/3mpmdvb47qc2e

#LLM #ClimateCrisis

NEW: How Google and AI Nearly Made a Seasoned Reporter Spiral

"I thought I had missed something major in my reporting. Turns out I had stumbled into an AI-fueled feedback loop that involved a real LLC’s fictional website and a search engine that’s thrusting unreliable answers on users."

https://www.propublica.org/article/google-ai-reporting?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mastodon-post

#News #Google #AI #Journalism #Media #Technology #Tech #Research #LLM #artificialintelligence

#Google Wants to Scan Your Hand for its #reCAPTCHA

https://www.privacyguides.org/news/2026/07/01/google-wants-to-scan-your-hand-for-its-recaptcha/

#privacy #CAPTCHA #bot

#German Court Says #Google Is Liable For False Claims In Its #AI Overviews Because They Are Its Own Words - https://www.techdirt.com/2026/07/01/german-court-says-google-is-liable-for-false-claims-in-its-ai-overviews-because-they-are-its-own-words/ "More generally, #liability concerns could mean that many current use cases for #agents won’t be commercially viable."

More than 200k users said NO!

More than 70 organisations signed a letter saying NO!

#FDroid wrote posts on why NOT!

We've talked with you and your representatives, around the world.

We've made the #KeepAndroidOpen website to explain it.

If you read the #Android tech news, you saw it.

If you use a search engine, you found it.

If you've asked their own #Gemini, you got the summary.

But who didn't see, hear or read anything from above? Yes, #Google

For your saftety? https://f-droid.org/2026/07/01/adv-malware.html

Les Années Vécues
https://philosophics.blog/2026/07/01/les-annees-vecues/?utm_source=masto&utm_medium=social
I’ve shared a piece of fiction writing meta content and the rôle of LLMs in my writing workflow, in particular, a punch list to track idea instantiation. I don’t, however, discuss my fondness for diacritical marks, especially those with no phonetic function.
#philosophy #writing #fiction #timetravel #LLM #scifi #process #author #time #blof #podcast #language #workflow #frnech #english #shortstory #method #ai #matrix #spreadsheet #google #claude #chatgpt

“Google wants a look at your hands before it lets you through. The company’s newest reCAPTCHA check, rolling out now as a test, asks you to switch on your camera and wave at it so an algorithm can decide whether you’re a human or a bot.

That wave is less casual than it looks. The system records a short video of your hand and pulls 21 hand-landmark coordinates from it, mapping your finger joints, your palm geometry, and the way you move in real time.

Google describes the purpose as liveness detection, a way for websites to fend off automated account creation, credential-stuffing, and other fraud. But this is still a biometric scan, collected so you can prove you’re a person and still involves turning on your cameras for Google.”

https://reclaimthenet.org/googles-new-recaptcha-wants-your-camera-access-and-21-points-of-your-hand

#Google #ReCAPTCHA #Biometrics #Privacy

This is the script of my national network radio tech report last Monday on the topic of Meta's monitoring of employees' computer activities, using that data to train AI -- and discussion of the broader implications of such projects. As always there may have been minor wording variations from this script as I presented this report live on air.

- - -

So yeah while this discussion is about Meta the same trend is happening at other Big Tech firms where employees are increasingly being subjected to mass layoffs or feel that they are being mistreated by management, and the impact of this could be quite dangerous for everyone who depends on services from these firms as the firms try to use AI as an excuse for all manner of bad corporate behaviors.

But regarding Meta, it's useful to recall that Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg has never been the poster boy for particularly admirable corporate leadership. Of course before Meta was Meta it was Facebook, and before that it was The Facebook and before that it was Facemash. This takes us all the way back to when Mark started this entire sordid set of events when, while a student at Harvard, he built a platform to help guys avoid dating what he and his Harvard bros considered to be unattractive women, sometimes using terms like "farm animals" for their comparisons. Apparently he threw this project together after being dumped by his then girlfriend.

This was all back around 2003. Facebook didn't change its name to Meta until around five years ago or so, when Mark became convinced that everyone would want to wear virtual reality headsets, working and playing in his virtual reality "metaverse" all day, and threw reportedly tens of billions of dollars at that project, some reports say 80 billion or so. And while there are continuing to be amazing applications for VR and Meta VR headsets, the idea that this was going to be a dominant way for people to routinely interact was, what's that technical term? -- oh yeah, crazy.

Of course over the years Meta/Facebook has been embroiled in a wide variety of issues related to privacy and a long list of other controversies. So now Mark has changed his mind again, and has decided that he should throw most of Meta's resources at -- you guessed it -- AI. And the way he did this was for example, reportedly by reassigning product managers and skilled engineers to be essentially AI trainers, understandably considered to be work far below their skill levels, and laying off other employees. Then Meta came up with the idea that is somewhat akin to driving a stake through the heart of employee morale, already apparently at historically low levels for the firm. And while I don't know offhand who specifically originated this train wreck of a concept, it seems like something Mark would have quickly and enthusiastically endorsed.

So this is called MCI -- Model Capability Initiative. This was launched just a couple of months ago, and collected employee keystrokes, mouse movements, screen shots, etc. to be used for AI training. Initially there was no opt-out. Then they apparently introduced a limited half hour opt-out. As you MIGHT imagine this didn't go over well with most employees. Even when using a company provided computer as in this situation, employees routinely deal with personally sensitive subjects including financial and medical information and much more. And you can't blame employees for being decidedly unenthusiastic about being forced to train AI systems that they quite reasonably suspected Meta would like to use to lay them off and replace them.

Well, this was all bad enough, but then very recently the fan really got splattered when it was discovered that the data being collected this way had not been properly secured internally, and was reportedly accessible to pretty much anyone at the firm. Whammo. So about a week ago the MCI program was suspended for some indefinite period -- maybe forever, we don't know -- while "investigations" take place into how this happened. This whole awful affair seems pretty much on-brand for Zuckerberg, but again it would be a mistake to think that this kind of situation could only occur at Meta.

Because across the technology sector we see firms increasingly treating the employees who actually built these firms as expendable, sometimes to be replaced with half-baked, dangerous misinformation-laden AI, that drives customers and employees alike utterly nuts.

But it does seem like Large Language Model AI is close to "jumping the shark" as the saying goes, or perhaps already has, and is starting to face some serious reckonings. That recent German court decision I discussed recently, holding Google responsible for the content of their AI Overviews -- that spout 10s of millions of wrong answers an hour -- could be just the beginning.

If courts begin widely holding Big Tech AI firms responsible for their AI-generated content -- search answer overviews, chatbots, and so on, this very reasonable, common-sense approach could trigger massive changes in the way these firms operate and might signal an end to the abandon with which AI-created misinformation, sometimes dangerous and harmful, is so widely spewed.

How these firms treat their own employees could be viewed as somewhat akin to a canary in a coal mine regarding how these firms will treat all of us. And judging from the mess at Meta in this respect, we probably shouldn't expect a "customer is always right" approach from Big Tech firms, that's for sure.

- - -

L

#meta #google #ai #metaverse

Top #Google Security Staff Warn Search Data Could Be Hacked if #EU Rules Change

https://www.wired.com/story/top-google-security-staff-warn-search-data-could-be-hacked-thanks-to-eu-plans/

#privacy #DMA #politics

Wow – pure SnakeOil, those so-called anti-virus or anti-malware scanners! "we are unable to proceed with the whitelisting request unless the application is available on the Google Play Store"?!? WTF?!? 🤯

And yes, that's part of a real response a dev got.

So they claim: your app is malware, as long as it is not at Google Play. I'd say we've heard it the other way around, too…

#SnakeOil #AntiVirus #MalwareScanner #falsePositive #Google

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Excerpt from the reply by a so-called security company: Thank you for your response and for sharing the details regarding your application. We understand your concerns and appreciate your efforts toward promoting open-source software. However, as per our internal protocol, we are unable to proceed with the whitelisting request unless the application is available on the Google Play Store. We regret that we are unable to disclose our internal analysis process or the criteria used for our evaluations, as these are confidential. Once your application is published on the Google Play Store, please feel free to resubmit your whitelisting request. We will then be happy to review it in accordance with our standard process. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and appreciate your understanding.

Google's new CAPTCHA asks you to wave at your camera. It records your hand movements, extracts 21 joint coordinates, then deletes the video. Google says it's safe. But normalizing camera checks for basic website access is a privacy line worth noticing. #privacy #captcha #google #biometrics #indigoprivacy

Google's new CAPTCHA asks you to wave at your camera. It records your hand movements, extracts 21 joint coordinates, then deletes the video. Google says it's safe. But normalizing camera checks for basic website access is a privacy line worth noticing. #privacy #captcha #google #biometrics #indigoprivacy