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Google’s Bard AI can now access Gmail, Drive, Docs, and more

⁨314⁩ ⁨likes⁩

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Geert@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2073592/googles-bard-ai-can-now-access-gmail-drive-docs-and-more.html

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Comments

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  • Buffalox@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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 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, that would have been unheard of prior to Internet becoming widely used.

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    • huginn@feddit.it ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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.

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      • rebul@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        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/

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      • Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        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 “Pops” and pay $500 million “cost of doing business” while making 1000+ billion.

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      • Buffalox@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        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.

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  • LostDeer@infosec.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Can’t wait for bard to join the google graveyard with stadia once the ai fad passes!

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    • dukk@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      If it passes.

      I hope it passes.

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      • SupraMario@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        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.

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      • regbin_@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Why? I think it’s amazing. I fiddle with text-to-image and LLMs daily (running locally of course) and I find them to be very interesting.

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  • Z4rK@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Man I can’t wait to get 100% out of gmail.

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    • ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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.

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      • Z4rK@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        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.

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      • blabber6285@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        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.

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  • juniorneptune@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    What makes anyone think google didn’t have the access before anyway?

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    • Nioxic@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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…

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    • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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.

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  • reagansrottencorpse@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Me, who’s had a Gmail account as my main email for twenty plus years. 😞

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    • vale@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I’ve been meaning to switch off of Google for months now, but never had the time to properly research what exactly that entails

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      • plz1@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        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.

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      • silentknyght@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Curious what you decide. I feel trapped. My Gmail has been my primary account for almost 20 years. With that kind of longevity, switching would be extremely disruptive.

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      • mojo@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        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.

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    • xthexder@l.sw0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Gmail is only 19 years old, but okay.

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      • reagansrottencorpse@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        I’ve had it since it came out, so 19 years then I guess. Cut me some slack.

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  • Norgur@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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.>

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    • ShittyRedditWasBetter@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      🤷‍♂️ you weren’t going to pay for it, gotta pay for compute somehow.

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    • huginn@feddit.it ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I mean… what else could they offer to make it more comforting?

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      • WiseMoth@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Idk why you’re being downvoted. You’re completely right

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  • sirico@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Nothing could possili go wrong

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  • Zaphod@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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

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    • ares35@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      narrator: 'google knows about those things, too.'

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    • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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.

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  • Doorbook@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    These companies just push hard for people to leave them.

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  • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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.

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    • baruchin@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Geez! Who does that?

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      • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Old people

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    • Natanael@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      They’ll probably isolate the models from each other, but yeah, if they want to train shared models from private data then that could happen.

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      • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        But bard is the public one, right?

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    • regbin_@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      That won’t work because they’re not going to train Bard on your email contents or documents.

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      • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        So what does bard do with the access then? Is it like bing chat that can choose to search things?

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  • Engywuck@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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.

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    • Bluesheep@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Without going to whole hog and hosting my own infrastructure, what are some good alternatives?

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      • BlueKey@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Proton

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      • Engywuck@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Mailbox, posteo, zoho, skiff…

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      • mishimaenjoyer@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        proton suite. i'm using it since 2016 and never looked back.

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    • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I thought it was a get people hooked then charge out the nose later thing.

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    • atrielienz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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.

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  • cy_narrator@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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.

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    • pineapplelover@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Outlook is just choosing another big tech. Why not something like protonmail or tutanota?

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      • PastorHaggis@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        I’m starting to switch over to Proton. I haven’t paid for it yet but my plan is to start paying and potentially grab usernames on other sites so I can have a consistent email across any site I decide to use.

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  • hornedfiend@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Good luck using all my spam I get on my gmail I box to serve me ads that get blocked instantly.

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  • regbin_@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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.

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    • Eccitaze@yiffit.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      If you believe Google isn’t planning on eventually training Bard on Gmail, then I have a half dozen bridges to sell you.

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      • regbin_@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        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.

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  • BallShapedMan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Queue the I’m in danger meme

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    • brisvag@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Cue* ;)

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      • BallShapedMan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Dang… you’re right.

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  • ShittyRedditWasBetter@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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.

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    • atrielienz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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.

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  • AceFuzzLord@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Only reason I use my gmail anymore is literally only for the people I actually care about on yt. It’s not ideal, but I’d rather they only take the data from what I watch, which isn’t useful when they aren’t able to show me ads.

    Though, they also get info from the remaining services I have yet to switch from my gmail as well, so yeah. Again, not ideal, but better than nothing.

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    • pineapplelover@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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.

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      • AceFuzzLord@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        As much as I don’t like gøøgl€, on the phone front, it’s the lesser of the two evils I can choose from currently. I probably won’t be able to outright buy my next phone before getting service and slap on a custom ROM, so I’d rather deal with the devil I know over appl€.

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