Wow, how did Google find out something they gave to Google? I’m perplexed!
It’s a good wake up call though for anyone that thought that anything you give them is private
The issue isn’t, and was never in these cases, that some private information is stored on said company’s servers. The issue is that they advertise and promise privacy but break that contract.
While I agree that people should generally be well informed about these topics at this point. The reality is that not everyone is. And even then, there are many people (probably most) that don’t know of viable alternatives. And even with self-hosting, even if the will is there not everyone has the skillset or the means (buying hardware, or a place to run it).
The bottom line is that for many people moving away from cloud hosted docs isn’t a straightforward prospect.
“… in Google Docs”
Well, there ya go.
Yup.
Writing a thing right now. It’s all pen and paper until I’m ready to publish
“on his own Google Doc”
How did you think it was your Doc? It never was.
Earlier this year the FBI, desperate to to make Kash Patel look competent, released video in the Nancy Guthrie kidnapping that shouldn’t have existed, but for Guthrie’s porch camera spying on her via Google, and then fortuitously capturing some footage of her kidnapper.
Any device with a camera, microphone and a wireless connection or bluetooth signal is almost certainly spying on you, and while most of that data is likely just used to train AI models, this case tells us it may also be harvested in government databases.
So yes, of course any data you actively give them is being harvested too. Be responsible with your tech.
The united States circumvents your rights to privacy by buying bulk data from data brokers. Those data brokers buy that data from any and every little app on google play store. Something as inocculus as a Bible app is selling your location and meta data to Israel where they sift through the data.
This also let’s them bypass and get more data on you than the goverment is allowed to collect on you personally. Because its a private buisness they can collect and sell everything. The fact that some of these companies operate in Israel gives them even more ability to abuse your rights. There’s a good reason why every major tech company employs someone from unit 8200 or is directly partnered with them.
Unless you run the hardware, and install your own software you are fucked. And even then your open source whatever probably has a backdoor on its dependency for a dependency in the dependency.
“They”???
The ominous “they”
This is why if your camera sends data to an outside source, we just won’t use it.
Google has to be the most consumer un friendly company on the planet. They have zero respect for their user base. Haven’t for a long time.
Their users are goods, respect devalues the goods
Just assume everything you push into the web gets trained on. Probably also stuff you say while your phone/smart tv/ echo dot whatever is around.
Also whatever you type into your phone’s keyboard regardless of actually posting what you typed, unless you specifically go out of the way to get one that doesn’t log every key press like Google’s does.
Run degoogled android/GrapheneOS and don’t buy anything with a processor and wireless connectivity that doesn’t strictly need them to function
don’t buy anything with a processor and wireless connectivity that doesn’t strictly need them to function
What do you mean I don’t need an LLM powered toaster?
How did it take until the last segment (after the mandatory website page break of “wont you real our other articles? Fine here’s the rest of that news story you were reading.”) For the reporter to even mention that it was in a google doc file.
And then t the end for them to close off with “forget hackers you best worry about who’s talking to an AI” instead of “dont fucking store sensitive data in a google doc, they’re training their LLMs on it.”
A big part of the AI providers revenue in the future will be “insights” – thinly anonymized user data and its analysis as a service.
You can see how fintech is doing the exact same thing today – providing live user data (and sometimes slowing them down just enough to skim of the top) to big investing companies.
So may be don’t shove your entire “source” folder into Claude.
Are they really an indie developer, or are they a clueless ai vibe coder using ai for everything?
Because they sound really clueless: “the creature’s name was never revealed anywhere outside of their private Google Drive.”
Private and google doesn’t go together.
Indie developers are every day people too. I’ve met some who worked as cooks and some who were surgeons. Not all of them are technically savvy beyond their toolsets.
