Google’s Bard AI can now access Gmail, Drive, Docs, and more
The latest updates to Google’s generative AI chat bot lets it dig through your personal email, documents, and more—so you can get things done faster.
I wouldn't be surprised if Alphabet has used data from all these sources all the time.
That's actually the reason I don't use gmail except for registering Android, or use google calender, or google search except occasionally. I have my youtube account separate from my Android, and I don't allow any cloud services, like photo or any other storage or sync services.
The power Google can gain from using these things in combination is huge, just like Facebook influenced the 2016 US presidential election, Google/Alphabet could use this for both political and financial gains to an enormous degree, that would have been completely unheard of prior to Internet becoming widely used.
They explicitly stated that they do not.
They have a lot of rules around data control and privacy that are followed internally because the engineers care to toe the line of public statements.
I hate to burst your bubble, but Google lies.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/google-pay-155-million-settlements-over-location-tracking-2023-09-15/
For the last three decades, tech companies have been operating in a "Ask for forgiveness, not permission" mentality.
Microsoft didn't get such a large monopoly by playing fair. Neither did Google, Amazon, Uber, etc.
They have always said one thing, the courts found it to be inaccurate, and then they go "Oops" and pay $500 million "cost of doing business" while making 1000+ billion.
Except you can have one account to cover all those Google services. Meaning it must be trivial for Alphabet/Google to do the same.
Just because your average engineer isn't allowed to, doesn't mean they can't do it at "special requests", like law enforcement or "research".
To put it another way, it's to much potential power to entrust with a single company.
Can't wait for bard to join the google graveyard with stadia once the ai fad passes!
If it passes.
I hope it passes.
It's already starting to, the AI groups of devs basically showed off an alpha to their CEOs, then those CEOs thought it's game changing....while the devs were like "no it's an alpha/pre-alpha and is really dumb"...but the CEOs rolled with it and are now finding how bad it is...so it's been getting slowly dropped. It's %100 a fad and has limited applications. It's really cool tech and I have used it, but it's not something that's going to replace many people.
Man I can’t wait to get 100% out of gmail.
Just curious- what exactly do you mean by that? Do you mean abandoning/trashing your google account, or do you mean also refusing to send email to gmail recipients?
Personally I’ve gone all the way. Ditching the Google acct was just the 1st step (which implies also ditching Google Playstore). Then I quit sending email to gmail & outlook recipients. Then I went further and do an MX lookup on all email addresses to verify whether a vanity address like bob@lastname.com resolves to google. This has made #email mostly dead to me.
I won’t stop sending to Google recipients. I have moved my email to Proton, but because of lacking search functionality there I have not yet migrated historic emails.
I’ve stopped using other Google services and deleted data except for Maps and YouTube. Maps I can probably get rid of. YouTube I’ll keep but may be able to use a more fake account.
I'm wondering what was the email usage like in the first place if you can just choose to stop sending to most people.
But to be honest, I've only sent handful of emails from my personal account within the same number of years.
What makes anyone think google didn't have the access before anyway?
They did. Its not about that
Now you can throw in a boring pdf, into your drive, and have bard read it and summarize each chapter. For example.
I asked it to read a report i have written for school and summarize it and give mr a few pointers where i could improve it. It was nice and speedy.
Granted the report isnt super long.
Wonder how well it does on a 700 page pdf..
They certaintly did, and already used AI to comb through it for their monitized stalking campaign. I think the only difference now is you can now make use of this somehow too, but I only read the headline lol.
Me, who's had a Gmail account as my main email for twenty plus years. 😞
I've been meaning to switch off of Google for months now, but never had the time to properly research what exactly that entails
I was primarily using Gmail and Youtube Music and the switch was fairly easy. Apple Music was a better replacement than the other competitors, and Proton Mail was super easy. Paying for both makes me "not the product, but an actual customer". Forwarded Gmail to Proton in about 30 seconds, and replaced Chrome with Firefox. Duck Duck Go isn't a "perfect" replacement for Google Search, but it's good enough.
Try to create a new email on a privacy respecting service and start with setting up email forwarding from Gmail to the new email. Then you just kinda slowly move your accounts over for a period of months or even years. I still keep my unused Gmail forwarding just in case.
Gmail is only 19 years old, but okay.
I've had it since it came out, so 19 years then I guess. Cut me some slack.
If you choose to use the Workspace extensions, your content from Gmail, Docs, and Drive is not seen by human reviewers, used by Bard to show you ads, or used to train the Bard model.
Yeah... really comforting, Google. Really comforting.
These companies just push hard for people to leave them.
I know people who have their passwords on a google doc or email passwords. I foresee a lot of accounts getting hacked once people can crack the right prompts for the LLM.
Geez! Who does that?
Old people
openai's chat gpt, and microsoft's bing flavor of chat gpt both have android apps. google's bard does not. that is all...
Switched to outlook but soon found out that some of your emails arent even received. That occured when I was trying to sign up to this lemmy instance. Luckily the admin was a very friendly person who understood the situation and manually approved my signup.
I mean, if Bard can access those things, that means Google already had access in the first place. I also don't mind if that means I get to enjoy a better service overall.
The things I don't want Google to know about I have separate anyways
narrator: 'google knows about those things, too.'
But individual users can target specific things to get out from the llm training data. I'm more okay with Google tuning it's spell check on my data than I am to letting anyone who knows how to ask my personality identifiable information. Even if I don't use Google drive/docs, someone else will use Google for their contacts, and then my security questions (why do companies still make people use those?!?) are public.
I mean, at this point I find very difficult to believe that people willingly putting their entire life in free Google accounts don't know that they're basically ads meat anyway. The outrage makes no sense.
Without going to whole hog and hosting my own infrastructure, what are some good alternatives?
Mailbox, posteo, zoho, skiff...
proton suite. i'm using it since 2016 and never looked back.
I thought it was a get people hooked then charge out the nose later thing.
This is absolutely true. Some of us were fine with the trade off in the beginning, because of how useful the services were when linked together. Google didn't start off with everything linked like it is now. This unification of all their services with no walls or filters has been an ongoing development for more than a decade. I remember having to be on a waiting list to even get a GMail account after getting an invite from someone I knew. I've been around using google services since then. Back when Gmail and the calender weren't separate apps. When YouTube wasn't linked to Gmail or a Google account the way it is now. The landscape has changed drastically.
Good luck using all my spam I get on my gmail inbox to serve me ads that get blocked instantly.
Edit: openboard autocorrect.
Only reason I ever use my gmail is because they are tied to my phone and some of the games on my phone, otherwise I wouldn't be using them.
I deleted google and only have game accounts email only from simplelogin aliases. Maybe you'll eventually realize google is a shit company and leave that environment as well.
Queue the I'm in danger meme
Cue* ;)
Dang... you're right.
Having generative AI hooked up to workspaces is a clear next step that's going to be very very popular. I'm not sure why this thread is shocked.
I wonder what will happen when proprietary Open AI LLM's start scraping data that the companies use them don't want scraped because it's proprietary. IT department using LLM for code for the company wide web portal. And now schematics for a new device are scraped etc.
This is super cool. No longer need to fiddle with third-party LLM APIs.
For those worried that your emails contents might get leaked, I'm pretty sure they're not using your email content to train, but only use it as context. LLMs are stateless, as soon you you start a new chat, it forgets everything from before.
If you believe Google isn't planning on eventually training Bard on Gmail, then I have a half dozen bridges to sell you.
That's a different thing and they will have to ask for consent separately. I'm specifically talking about the feature of allowing Bard to access your emails/schedules/etc.
