"Take a moment to think before you dive in. That’s the best advice for Google Photos users, as the company confirms its latest update can scan all your photos to “use actual images of you and your loved ones” in AI image generation. That means Gemini seeing who you know and what you do. You likely have tens or hundreds of thousands of photos. They’re all exposed if you update.

We’re talking Personal Intelligence, Google’s latest AI upgrade path which lets users opt-in to connecting Google apps to Gemini. Why search for a doctor’s appointment when Google has access to all your calendar events. Why search for a party invite when it reads all your emails. And why search for a specific photo of you and your loved ones to create an image, when it sees all your photos.

This is the latest iteration in the ongoing battle between convenience and privacy playing out on our phones and computers. “Previously, to get a result that felt truly personal, you had to write long, detailed descriptions and manually upload a reference photo just to give Gemini the right context.” Not any more, Google says. Its AI can scan everything to form its own views of you and everyone you know."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2026/04/20/google-starts-scanning-all-your-photos-as-new-update-goes-live/

#AI #GenerativeAI #Google #Gemini #Privacy #DataProtection

Google Starts Scanning All Your Photos As New Update Goes Live

Google wants its AI to see all the photos of "you and your loved ones." Billions of users must now decide.

Forbes
I'm sick and tired of all this anti-AI rantism. AI is a technology and, like all, technologies before it, it should be the target of democratic governance for the benefit of all human beings. To assign a deterministic "nature" to a tool is utter fetishistic https://www.reddit.com/r/LeftistsForAI/
@remixtures Leftists for AI? is this serious or just another psyop?

@remixtures

The great thing about being old is you don't really take pictures of yourself any more...

@darwinwoodka @remixtures my mom doesn't take pictures of herself anymore, but she sure does take pictures of my nephews who are way too young to consent to their likeness being used in AI. Fortunately she doesn't have google photos afaik, but I'm sure there are lots of other happy grandparents who do
@remixtures all my photos are of my cats. They are going to get nothing but cats.
It goes on, and on like this.
The Alignment Problem of Universities with AI

The alignment problem is often phrased as the fundamental challenge of ensuring that artificial intelligence (AI) acts in accordance with…

Medium
Adults Lose Skills to AI. Children Never Build Them.

Discussions of cognitive offloading often miss a critical distinction: What AI does to a 45-year-old's brain is categorically different from what it does to a 14-year-old's.

Psychology Today

@WilliamJKelleher @remixtures The entire educational industry is being captured by AI because Google and Microsoft are forcing capitulation.

It's on and nobody was asked. Your options are adopt it faster or dump buckets of training data while avoiding use.

@remixtures

wait, will it do this if I use google mail and docs/drive but have (I hope) turned off the AI/"smart" features? yikes

🤓 "This is opt-in, right?"

🤑 "why, of course"

🤓 "…and it’ll stay opt-in?"

🫥 <>

🤓 "Hello, Google…?"

@remixtures

I'm willing to bet there's no way to bulk delete my thousands of photos on there.

@remixtures

I need an open source program to allow me to search the pictures that I've saved on my hard drives. Once I have that, I'm deleting everything in Google Photos.

Any recommendations?

#AskFedi #tech #technology #GooglePhotos #FediTechSupport

Immich

Self-hosted photo and video management solution. Easily back up, organize, and manage your photos on your own server. Immich helps you browse, search and organize your photos and videos with ease, without sacrificing your privacy.

Immich