My experience with Gemini:
Hey Google, set a timer for 5 minutes.
Gemini: I’m sorry, I don’t understand.
WTF is the point of it then?
Imagine taking away the only useful feature of a voice assistant 💀
My recent experience with my phone is I tell it to set a 5 minute timer and it sets one in the fucking Google search browser, and if I page away I lose the timer.
I just use the timer on my microwave, I suppose the kitchen is the most likely place you’d want a timer. Unless you were using 5 minute epoxy.
When I first got into Android (I miss my Nexus 6 T.T ), it felt like I could do so much more with my phone than I can now. I had so much cool automation shit that leveraged stuff like Google assistant voice commands, but now it’s shit on so many levels. It goes beyond the user facing side of things; I used to use the app Tasker for a lot of the automation stuff, and over the years, it seems like the dev has been climbing an uphill battle against Google gating off functionality, and generally making things opaque and difficult for developers.
Your chats are saved in your account for up to 72 hours, whether Gemini Apps Activity is on or off.
https://myactivity.google.com/product/gemini
I wonder how long before AI services are added to ad blockers and VPN privacy controls.
up to 72 hours
(then we permanently add them to our private fingerprint folder based on any google-related link or api you’ve ever interacted with)
The time limits on their spyware might as well be ignored.
Bwahahahah
I locked that shit out fucking day one. Fuck Gemini.
Narrator: And users did not in fact, take action.
It’ll just be one more thing for them to complain and do nothing about. That is all.
Most people wont even notice. My non techy friends love their new Pixel phones and all the AI assistance.
Doesnt Apple also do this with Siri and basically every app unless the user untoggles it?
Yes, for the amount of hate Google gets… Which I think it is fair to be critical of any product that compromises privacy… I recently tried helping my mom clean up her iPhone, and seriously like 100x worse. Almost everything you do on Apple demands you have another Apple device. One of the worst experiences I’ve ever dealt with.
Isn’t there some form of sampling bias here though? The kind of people who generally would care about these things likely also care about interoperability and would be on Android. I wouldn’t be surprised if iPhone users simply don’t care if Apple demands them to do anything.
Kinda sounds like you just don’t know how to use an iPhone.
Absolutely not the case… I sense a bad case of Stockholm syndrome.
Because i think cleaning up an iPhone is easy?
Yes and you have to untoggle it for each and every app individually
Except Apple has better marketing, and is primarily marketed for those who’re excited for every tech “innovation”.
Anyone know if this is happening outside the US and if it is whether it’s happening inside the EU?
Yeah, this seems like an easy lawsuit in the EU tbh
I live in Finland using Android on a Nokia and I can switch Gemini off completely and choose to use the old Google Assistant instead. It did initially appear out of nowhere when they patched it in, but I could immediately turn it off with the same prompt that the other guy also got.
If it’s unavoidable it seems to be an US only thing atm.
I’m in the UK and today I got asked whether I wanted to leave this on or not - it just notified me and asked me to confirm my consent.
So I think this article’s headline is slightly misleading - Google is actively informing users and asking them to confirm their consent.
That’s good. I haven’t had anything though, hopefully saved by the EU.
Opt-out by default in the EU I’m fairly sure.
You can check here: https://myactivity.google.com/product/gemini
I switched Gemini language to an unsupported language.
I just removed gemini from my phone.
me too and then it somehow popped up in messages which I had to “turn off” separately. removing AI from an Android phone is an illusion.
Make your next phone a Pixel and load GrapheneOS onto it. Problem solved.
Pixel stopped publishing device trees since a few weeks ago, it will be significantly more difficult for the devs now to continue maintaining it.
I would already do it now if not for banking apps
Is there a petition for antitrust charges against Google somewhere? I’m over the duopoly. Both options suck.
I’m not signed into a Google account on my phone, am I safe?
ADB tools —> remove google services and other spyware apps —> oops, you bricked your phone
I just went into my settings after reading this article (and getting a bit frustrated that it was a wall of text with no clear instructions right up front).
I did a search in settings for “gemini” and found the Gemini settings. There’s no clear ‘off’ switch. But there’s is an option to switch back to Google Assistant. So I did that. And not when I search for Gemini in settings it urges me to enable Gemini.
I’m taking that as a good sign that I’ve disabled it permanently. Thought I’d post this info in case it helps someone else. Or so if I’m incorrect somebody else can correct me.
I mean there were no instructions up front because literally Google is refusing to give them, basically.
No more choice just the company force feeding the user and saying it’s good for them.Nowhere in the email or any of the Support pages did Google say how to remove all Gemini integrations from my phone.
I then emailed Google PR and… I asked if someone could provide actionable guidance for my readers who want to ensure Gemini integrations are completely disabled. Instead of answering the question, the person responding to my email wrote, in part: “This update is good for users: they can now use Gemini to complete daily tasks on their mobile devices like send messages, initiate phone calls, and set timers while Gemini Apps Activity is turned off. With Gemini Apps Activity turned off, their Gemini chats are not being reviewed or used to improve our AI models.”Literally that reads like you can’t turn it off and they just scrape less of your data on a technicality.
I just spent half an hour yesterday uninstalling all apps, registry entries and in-program options for Copilot in Windows and MS Office… but I still can’t get rid of the Copilot button in Outlook. Searching for answers I ended up at the Microsoft support forums and clicked a link to office dot com… and realized there that the entire ecosystem is now called MS365 Copilot App (formerly known as Office)… so I suspect there will be NO way to remove this stuff in the future, and probably that MS365 Copilot will eventually replace Windows itself.
While I wouldn’t assume anything is permanent these days, I’d agree for the moment. I had already uninstalled Gemini on my phone (2ish months ago) and just verified I still see Google listed as the default assistant.
AICore under all apps. Disable and delete files. Done.
This reminds me that i wanted to unlicl my bootloader on my phone…
Hey Folks, we have “AI” for you and you will use it, whether you want it or not…
I swear, whenever I try to use it, it just makes me wish I could delete it. I ask the answer to a simple question and it gives me a whole essay on how this one aspect of what I said is more nuanced than one would imagine, and I’m left there waiting 5 minutes to get it to say anything of substance, but it doesn’t when I explicitly tell it to “just give me the fucking answer”, which I have to say every time for it to say anything useful.
It also doesn’t work with timers or anything actually useful and I doubt it’ll get any better with third party app access.
Google assistant was so much better, it even still works with its servers being down (for me at least) because it’s a better assistant than whatever Gemini is supposed to be.
Gemini? I don’t have Gemini in my pixel 8a, stock
I mean, Google Assistant is getting replaced with Gemini and so far that was the biggest pain point of mine: No I don’t want to turn on Gemini activity history, yes I still want to be able to make calls with it…
This is nicer, imo. You can just not have Gemini app to not let this happen. 72 hour retention is pretty standard, if not better than most of free LLM providers. I hate Google with passion and I try to avoid them as much as possible but Gemini is just so darn easy to use. I also use Kagi and their assistant does most of the heavy lifting & privacy concerning.
edit: Clearly there are some misunderstandings? They have been basically putting pretty much essential features behind the wall of opting in for App history for no reason. I compromise and use them for trivial stuff.
You can always delete Gemini app or turn of integrations manually(sucks that its opt out and not opt in). This is better since it’s giving privacy aware who wish to disable history but still want to use integrations, a choice.
