Comment on Israel’s IDF Bans Android Phones—iPhones Now ‘Mandatory’
bss03@infosec.pub 2 weeks agoI’ve lost features that used to work without Gemini, but I believe it is disabled on both my Pixel 7 Pro and the Pixel 8 I have access to.
Comment on Israel’s IDF Bans Android Phones—iPhones Now ‘Mandatory’
bss03@infosec.pub 2 weeks agoI’ve lost features that used to work without Gemini, but I believe it is disabled on both my Pixel 7 Pro and the Pixel 8 I have access to.
muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Nope, it’s still running in the background. You just turned off its ability to interact with you but can and does still interact with others.
bss03@infosec.pub 2 weeks ago
Do you have some sort of evidence for this claim?
muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
www.kaspersky.com/blog/…/m and proton.me/blog/turn-off-gemini-on-android were easy enough to find. If I remember correctly the grapheneOS guys spoke on this too.
bss03@infosec.pub 2 weeks ago
The first one does tell you how to “completely remove Gemini from your smartphone” under that heading. I do not have the Gemini app installed.
The second one says:
But, I’ve also disabled Google Assistant across all applications, so I don’t share data with Gemini/Assistant. I had to lose some features to do so.
Overall, your reply serves to confirm for me that I have disabled Gemini on both of my Android devices. Still, I appreciate the links!
titanicx@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Trust him bro…
bss03@infosec.pub 2 weeks ago
Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me either way. There IS a lot of telemetry and other BS that is definitely still on my phone, included in OS updates, and not uninstallable (I can “uninstall updates”, but that would also give me back any security issues). But, I don’t think that it is Gemini, or at least predates that naming convention.
To get free of Google telemetry, I’d have to install a non-Google ROM, and I haven’t ever tried that.
Telemetry certainly can be abused, and Google should be legally (by regulation) required to provide a simple opt-out. BUT, telemetry really is a fairly normal thing to include in “web-scale” deployments and is primarily used to discover issues that have escaped into production without affecting a testing environment–or, at least, that what the telemetry systems I’ve interacted with as an software developer were for. So, I’m not too worried about non-personalized data collection.