I spent 10 mins trying to find a clear statement of whether Google uses information submitted to Gemini for training and I couldn't find one. It is hard not to come to the conclusion they actively try to obfuscate it because there are many statements that vaguely sound like they should address it but then don't properly do that.
So I would have to suggest, use these features with extreme caution on any page you consider private if you aren't prepared for your private information to get sucked into Google's Gemini training data.
It's right there in the privacy center. The answer is quite unambiguously yes by the way. (This is for the Gemini app):
"How your data is used
Google uses this data, as described in our Privacy Policy, to:
Provide our services
Maintain and improve our services
Develop new services
Personalise our services (learn more)
Customise our services
Communicate with you
Measure performance
Protect Google, our users and the public
These uses extend to the generative AI models and other machine-learning technologies powering our services."
The wording is intentionally broader than just training. It encompasses training and anything else they want to do with your data in the name of "maintain and improve our services".
Safe to assume they will use your data for pretty much anything they can, including model training.
When you go to the Gemini in Chrome section on the same privacy page it states:
'When you use the Gemini in Chrome feature, Gemini collects and processes page content and the URL from the browser tab you’re viewing by default. Some of the page content Gemini uses might not be visible to you."
I think they're being reasonably explicit about what they're doing.
Note: I'm in the EU so not sure if this is what's shown everywhere else.
If I am looking at a web page that shows me my own API keys for a service in plain text, and I accidentally click the Gemini button while viewing that page, is there a chance that someone in six months time might ask Gemini for an API key for that service and have mine returned to them?
I'd love to get a confident answer to that question.
The parent comment has a point. A layperson (or at least many people not read into this topic) isn't going to read the language in that privacy policy and come to the conclusion that "any private web page you ask Gemini about will be dumped into our training data". The text on Google's privacy page could absolutely be made more explicit.
I'm sceptical a layperson will understand or care what it means that their data will be used in training. If you are concerned about such things this heavily implies you don't want to share your data. Just don't agree to the terms and move on.
We had legal trying to figure out if data submitted to Google Cloud was shared with Google, and the conclusion was that it is unclear from their TOS. Their TOS is a bunch of circular references to different agreements.
I think it goes without saying that anything Google provides for free, they do it to garner user data. Traditional search is dying. And so is the advertising that comes with it. They are finding alternatives. They'll keep "injecting" themselves into everything we use regularly. Ads will get even more targeted... much more contextual in realtime.
I never asked for it, or agreed to anything having to do with it. I'm pissed off to find it bound to a hotkey or gesture on my phone (I'm still not clear what the actual gesture is that keeps invoking the damn thing).
The more unsolicited crap Google jams down the pipe at me, the sooner they're going to discover I'm not at the other end and the pipe feeds straight into a septic field.
If anyone from Google is reading this, I hope you're ashamed of your dark patterns. You used to be a testament to the ideal of putting the user first. Now I can't distinguish you from any other crummy, misleading, self-serving tech gorilla.
This is the problem with being the biggest in X. Facebook desperately tried to branch out: phones, video, VR... Eventually the only thing that worked was buying other social media companies.
Google is in the same position, yes they have Android, GCP, Gmail/work suite, etc but even all of that combined couldn't sustain the moloch.
These insane levels of revenue streams cannot be sustained with just one product for longer periods of time. Eventually, every one of these biggest X'es will need to branch out to different industries/domains to sustain those levels.
If Google had simply stuck at what they used to be, a solid search engine with some unobtrusive ads plus some other ancillary services, they could have sustained that more or less indefinitely. What can't be sustained is the endless growth that the stock market demands. If you dare to say "you know what, this is probably enough" you'll be immediately punished by the market.
We are seeing the counter proof right now. Search in itself isn't sustainable. The concept is challenged by GenAI-based approaches.
Of course they are not a 1:1 replacement, but for the first time we see Google's model being challenged and them having to defend, which they do by trying to drive competition of by integrating genai into their products. Once the competition is gone, they can reconsider.
They are definitely capable of writing such statements, which you can see in their enterprise products. In my Google Workspace gemini app it says pretty prominently and clearly:
Your [ORGNAME] chats aren’t used to improve our models
So they definitely understand that people want to hear that their data isn't being used for training, and they know how to say it clearly and reassuringly. Which makes the omission of that in their consumer products more telling in my view.
So, naive question: If you click this button while looking at your bank account or, say, a mortgage application form, or a government website where you're paying taxes, etc... is all your form input literally just sucked into some insecure dataset in the cloud used for training Gemini?
I think if Google trained current models on private data, confidential info would leak constantly, it would be an absolute trainwreck. If Gemini leaked your Gmail and Chrome activity, Google would get sued and regulated into oblivion.
But Google needs to leave this option open in the future, in case they have to go all-in on an arms-race against China, if Chinese AI starts becoming an actual threat somehow. And it's easy to predict the USA gov would prioritize that race over privacy concerns.
As far as I can tell, Linux will remain not targeted by attempts to sponge off all kinds of user data. Which makes me so happy that I finally made the leap.
From what I heard it's only not on Linux yet because they've had some serious crashes due to incompatibility with Wayland. Don't worry, it'll come to Linux in time.
This is literally the worst part of Gemini. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out if, and if so what, they are training on even with my stupid $250/mo subscription. It's totally opaque.
being privacy centric is a badge of honor these days, so if they aren't making it clear or not giving an easy to find option, then it's a guaranteed to your queries and outputs are used for training.
Ex-Googler here, at least in the UK, privacy was taken very seriously by all employees, we never collected data without explicit consent and never used it for anything but what the user granted permissions for.
> privacy was taken very seriously by all employees, we never collected data without explicit consent and never used it for anything but what the user granted permissions for.
Or except when you literally trick people into providing their data by connecting totally unrelated services https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1908951546869498085 and you don't stop until the person gives up and submits to you.
Thanks for the suggestion. It supports multi-lingual typing which in a requirement for me. I haven't checked other keyboards for a long time so perhaps that has become more common.
I don't find the multilingual features as polished as Gboard, this is what prevents me from switching, in Gboard you can install multiple languages and write without having to switch and it will provide autosuggestions and spelling support based on the language you're typing without having to manually change the language
I recommended FUTO keyboard in sibling comment. FlorisBoard is a nice FOSS option, but some features are still WIP. Personally, I've switched fully to ThumbKey, but that's got quite a learning curve.
Always assume companies will gather, use and share your data in all ways they legally can. The burden of proof is never on the user that companies don't milk us. Calling it "misinformation" as someone further above did is bizarre. This is the default business model of big tech.
Phew, thank goodness someone policed this HN comment's quip about a multi-billion dollar company. May I recommend a more ambitious target in your war on misinformation next?
Whether it's aimed at large companies or not, I'd still rather not see misinformation spread. People already have poor enough understandings of what companies actually do and don't collect. There exists ongoing conspiracy theories that phones actively listen to conversations while in your pocket, despite there being no evidence to such a claim.
Facts do matter, and I appreciate those that make an effort to state them correctly.
So you click a button, it pops open a text box in a floating window, you type in a question, and the AI replies. This is the most underwhelming implementation of browser-based AI that they could have come up with. Quite literally just gemini.google.com in an iFrame.
No, it can only access the tab you are currently on. And that too just the content that is already available. It can't scroll up and down to load more. It can't follow links. It can't run any actions. You'll get a ton more functionality by just taking a screenshot of the page yourself and pasting it in ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini.
I'm sure that kind of functionality is coming. There's a lot of activity in the chromium repo (chrome/browser/actor/tools) that appears to be adding support for that sort of orchestration.
But whats the vision of this? Where are they trying to take the customer?
I feel like this issue relates back to the origin of Google (search) in the first place. It was borne out of a technology in which the founders did not envision what it would become. It seems the firm just tries ideas and then tries to figure out where it goes - thats the culture. And unsurprisingly, yields a lot of failiures.
In contrast, Apples approach yields a much higher rate of success with less risk.
I feel the same about Firefox's vision, although I admit I haven't tried it. Often when I visit a place like chat.mistral.ai Firefox gives a weird popup that says something about "don't you wish you didn't have to open this in a tab?" Like is that their AI vision? Saving me a tab?
No no no we don't need a sustainable answer to the cancer of ads on the internet, that would break capitalism and send the world sliding into chaos! No, see, what we need is AI in our browsers. That is going to transform things.
The idea is you could ask a to browser to do things like operate on multiple websites to do boring stuff, e.g. cross check phone reviews across sites x y and z.
I 100% don't feel comfortable letting my browser work alone, but "agentic browsers" are a thing some people want and/or are building.
A small part of me wants this to spectacularly succeed so I can stop using whatever the army of figma designers wishes to force down my throat when most things I need could be spreadsheets with a few buttons with macros hooked up.
It makes sense as an avenue for Agents as well, since it is the defacto "work app" platform. For many, their entire workday is spent inside the browser.
> So you click a button, it pops open a text box in a floating window, you type in a question, and the AI replies. This is the most underwhelming implementation of browser-based AI that they could have come up with. Quite literally just gemini.google.com in an iFrame.
Well, they're gonna have to support an astronomical scale of queries - not many companies in the world are able to do it and Alphabet is doing it pretty much on their own stack of cloud, a.i chips and software. So sure, the front end is not a big deal but this is still a big move.
They took 1 step at a time instead of trying to take multiple steps at a time, how is that a bad thing. They're obviously getting things prep'd for Chrome agents and Gemini 3.
I stopped using Chrome when they started doing the "logged in to Chrome" thing for all Google services. It seemed likely a creepy step in a vaguely defined, unknown direction. The signal seems stronger now.
Same. The removal of manifest V2 was one of the worst and most user hostile moves in a long time IMHO. Though the impending blocking of side loading and other locking down of Android stands to rival if not exceed it. Really dark times for Google
For me, the purpose of logging in to my Mozilla account in Firefox is to sync saved passwords and tabs between devices. If I was a Chrome user, I would want to log in to Chrome for the same reason.
The future of web browsing is the tiktok model. Where you don't surf the web, but the web is served to you "algorithmically". Do it long enough, and you'll be serve the pages you want and it will feel like it was your idea all along. Gemini everywhere is the first step.
Why stop there. Let the AI consume the content too, and then every day it can just serve a report saying that it consumed 1024 pieces of content and that this led to an increase in its satisfaction level.
Oh, I just got this dystopian image in my mind where you don't even talk about memes from content made by humans anymore and all you get are weird themes inserted into your custom generated content.
So just like how we don't watch the same thing at the same time anymore due to on-demand media, and the talking about yesterday's big TV show is only a thing of the past now. It will be one more step removed from that and you will have kids talking about this random thing that appeared in their custom show yesterday. Conversations like "dude, did you also get that singing toilet in your stream yesterday, what was that about".
Or you will get the pages that are good enough to hold your attention, while being short form enough to keep giving you small constant dopamine hits. Nothing too interesting or too long, keeping you chasing more hits, to prevent you from feeling like you really "finished" something significant, since that might feel like a stopping place and cause you to go do something else.
I wouldn't gave a major problem with this if the algorithms were tuned to my benefit. In fact, I probably prefer it since most of the web is noise that I don't need to see. So the problem isn't algorithmic content, it's closed source algorithms designed to benefit the company that made them rather than the user.
Google Discover is also remarkably bad at serving me stories I want to read, at least in my experience. One of those products that I wished worked better.
This seems ridiculously simple. It doesn’t browse for you in the background or lets you reference tabs etc. This just seems to pass the current page to an llm.
I built an extension like this with Claude-code a few days ago because I wanted to see if I could replace the ai feature of Firefox when I switched to LibreWolf. Turns out, it was quite easy for Claude code.
I want a bit further and tried to get the extension to browse around. Individual actions worked, but I couldn’t get it to follow a plan. In the end I finally looked around the code and Claude had made a huge mess with cursor etc.
The complexity of handling the array of messages was a bit too much for the AI agents.
I now have the same as this Gemini ai though and it CAN click links and it works with ollama too. So more private.
If I recall correctly, the main selling point of Firefox AI is that it's offline by default, which means that it doesn't rack up your token bill and doesn't expose your data.
No, Firefox out of the box has an AI side panel with options to use Claude. Most machines won't run a good enough local model so they don't default to that.
Firefox does several other things with AI too, and many of them locally, e.g. suggesting tab group names, suggesting other tabs to add to existing groups, auto-generating alt texts for images pasted into edited PDFs – each supported by a dedicated local model!
You can see which ones your Firefox installation has already fetched and their purpose on about:addons.
On top of that, current mobile versions (and weirdly enough only mobile versions) can now also summarize articles using Apple Intelligence (where available) or Mozilla-hosted remote inference: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/shake-to-summarize/
I imagine google has to build something that works for basically every kind of user out there, vs what you built. Moreover, it’s self obvious that they would support Gemini but not ollama, again given most users cannot run beefy LLMs on their consumer devices.
A danger with google is how flippantly they will ban google accounts for the dumbest things. Now theres a button to livesteam your browsing tied to your google account. I wonder how many people are going to lose 20 years of gmail Gphotos and GDrive files because they accidentally clicked gemini at the wrong moment on the wrong website.
I saw the new before I sleep, and slepped peacefully. Because I'd already switched to brave 2 years ago. And once more to firefox 2 months ago.
With firefox I feel I finally own my browser and no company is gonna push things down my throat I didn't first agree to
You might want to check Firefox' telemetry settings if you care about privacy. Or you can use Librewolf, it's an extension-compatible FF fork with privacy turned on.
Librewolf is great, but from my experience the default settings are painful for daily use. My biggest gripe is the auto-clear cookies on restart. I understand why it could be useful to some users, but for most I doubt they'd want that in a daily browser. This makes Librewolf need tweaking just as much as Firefox does which kind of ruins the point of it in my experience. (although you are tweaking for usability rather than privacy)
Clearing cookies automatically is good for your privacy though and is a sensible default for a "hardened" configuration. If you use the password manager logging in again when you want to shouldn't be an issue.
For what it's worth, Apple closed my mom's account due to inactivity. (She hadn't used an Apple product since 2007.)
They do have phone support, but they refused to unlock the account and just said she'll never be able to use primary email account with Apple's systems because of the frozen account.
So yes, any cloud provider can lock you out for arbitrary reasons. Just because they answer the phone doesn't mean the customer support agent can actually do anything about it.
At $1 / month having 50GB end-to-end encrypted storage and hide-my-email is reasonable in case your choice is better privacy over controlling your own mail domain.
Photos sync to iCloud is terrible slow though compared to Google Photos - syncing 100GB take days and 500GB takes forever. At least it end-to-end encrypted with Avanced Data Protection. But yeah if you multi-TB photo archive buying large storage options of iCloud make no sense simply because it's impossible to use.
Ah, the ol' Dropbox risk management tactic where they show you a random selection of your photos when you open the page. Or any page on the site. Suggested: "Remembering Summer Vacation 2020". By the way, do you want to compress your whole photo library to achieve Instagram quality while offering to consume more of the photos of your computer, disillusioned by the last few pennies of value that already fell. What's that? Your iCloud or Android device is out of space because the two ProRes videos your iPhone took after the commercial convinced the Apple user to engage the Apple proprietary video encoding button to maximize their Instagram engagement. The Samsung folds itself into a rolly-polly bug shell form. Eventually, all of your photos will be sent to Instagram, the final destination. Once there, after compressing your photos without asking, they will insist on your choosing ZSTD as the coffin.
So, on the consent-quality-useful triangle (WIP), Google is clearly eliminating quality and consent to provide you with a useful interface to the Google consentless compression box. Just what everyone wanted. The future is now.
Notification: You have 2 new views (details button: 2 ad-consenting views, 0 other views) on the photo you took of the compression artifact on a video that you suspect Google might have accidentally compressed without your consent, confusing itself to be Instagram. Unfortunately, your comparison photo gets equally confused and is compressed to be equally as bad as the compressed one. Now the photos look identical, and you look like a conspiracy theorist tweeting about "video encoding" from your Sesame Street Elmo phone, just like everyone else, with no issue at all. "We're in the Ourobouros. Maybe Paramount isn't the issue. Maybe it's Paramount Plus." The Samsung rolly-polly bug interrupts and insists this issue will have to wait because it's 2pm on Friday. Now, your Elmo phone is now the only device still working in the office, as you try to convince your wife why you have to stay late, "Because you're different than the rest of the people posting compression artifact-laden photos."
Google wiped my account for posting a jpeg of a credit card form with "THIS POST ONLY VIEWABLE WITH GOOGLE+ GOLD" to their old social media site. Gmail,Gdrive, everything tied to the account gone forever. They would only tell me it got flagged "phishing". The TOS has a laundry list of words to ban you under. Whichever reason their overseas moderation farm clicks, after looking 0.7 seconds at a screengrab flagged by a hallucinating AI, isn't ever going to be reviewed by anyone further. There's no support or appeal path for a free account.
I was really upset when I found out that my $20 a month Gemini AI Pro subscription only only included privacy features if stopped using the chat history feature.
It isn't because I have never enabled the feature? All the sessions have been temporary. Now it started complaining about that. It didn't do that before.
> Assouvissez votre créativité sans changer de page
> Have a question about what you're reading? Ask Gemini. It uses the context of your open tabs to provide relevant answers and explanations, keeping you focused.
In France some bits of the page are localized, some are still in English -- doesn't project professionalism or inspire confidence.
Right it felt pretty bad. It chugs tons of tokens just to be like "I need to scroll up!". Then 5 seconds later it scrolls up, chugs more tokens. "I need to scroll up more!"
Google would control everything if they could, but this won’t achieve that and they know that so it’s not the specific intention of this. Even if you’re feeling doomerish about it.
My theory is that Google wants to bake Gemini into Chrome to preempt a future antitrust ruling ordering them to spin the browser out, for the same reason Microsoft made IE an integral part of Windows 98.
For one second, I thought Chrome now supported the Gemini protocol. Then I came back to reality.
> To use Gemini in Chrome on your computer, you need to:
Be 18 or over and in the US.
Use a Mac or Windows computer.
Use the latest version of Chrome. Learn how to update
Chrome.
Sign in to Chrome. This feature isn’t available in
Incognito mode. Learn how to sign in to Chrome.
Have Chrome’s language set to English (United States).
Why can't I set Chrome to whichever language I may want and still have that Gemini thing in english?
Typical corporate doublespeak. The web is neither "mine", nor am I ever in control. If anything, the web belongs to corporations like Google. By integrating their text prediction, summarization, and hallucination engine into their web browser, they're further cementing their position of control.
You need to do it via Gemini in Chrome in an updated Chrome install (roughly 140.0.7339.186 or newer) on Mac/Windows using the English language with the relevant permissions enabled in the sections under chrome://settings/ai
My guess is it's either the first part (doing it via Gemini in Chrome) or the last part (permissions enabled).
I typed @gemini in the searchbar and it turned blue and text switched to 'Ask Gemini' to indicate it worked (but it didn't work - Gemini says it doesn't have access to the screen/webpage).
chrome://settings/ai redirects to chrome://settings (general settings). Manually searching 'ai' brings up dozens of other settings - stuff like 'mail' (which contains 'ai' string) - but nothing Gemini-related.
On the most up to date chrome: Version 140.0.7339.186 (Official Build) (arm64)
The instructional video [0] says there should be a 'Gemini' icon on the top of the Chrome browser, but I don't have one (macOS). (do I have to have a paid Gemini account for it to be there?).
In any case, when OpenAI and Grok launch things, I usually just go and try them in about 20 seconds. By comparison Google's AI launches are tedious..
The "Ask Gemini" thing existed before this, between that and the lack of an AI settings page it seems it's not considering the system as one of the initial supported ones (but why specifically I'm not sure).
I can confirm a paid Gemini account is not [corrected] needed.
No problem, it took me a minute to get it enabled myself - not sure why it's so special cased for what it is.
My apologize, I swear I tried to type "is not needed" but must have completely brain farted.
To reclarify: A paid account is NOT needed. I do not have one and it works. Do note the page says a US based Google account is needed though, it just doesn't need to be a paid gemini account.
Isn't Google putting AI results at the top some sort of conflict of interest?
Like if users can just get the info they want right at Google.com why would they click through to any of the search results? Isn't that stealing clicks from websites?
I mean, is anyone really surprised that this was going to happen?
Google is about to break even further away in the LLM race with this move, seeing as they will be getting an absolutely, supremely stunning amount of regular and novel data 24/7. Not everyone uses dedicated LLM interfaces, but more people I know use Google search. As Google === Search for so many.
Nevertheless, it is an business savvy move to make, considering the recent ruling by the judge to not force Google to split apart or break up its business w/r/t to Chrome.
I bet the judge already realizes how mistaken he was to let them off. Now they'll use their monopoly product to ensure monopoly control in the new market he was so sure would rein them in.
The differences between Chrome and Firefox are too minimal to chalk up Chrome's market share to preference. From 2008-2010 maybe, but Chrome established such a lead in that time that its inertia (and Chromebooks) did the rest.
This is... a woefully uninformed statement. You realize they just lost several monopoly cases, including around Chrome? They just got off on the meaningful penalty.
Google is an anticompetitive monopoly, and Chrome is an anticompetitive monopoly. This has been established by multiple courts of law. Your armchair claims to the contrary hold no water.
My friend, I suggest reading the actual lawsuit and rulings before commenting.
The case ruled that google search was a monopoly for using anti-competitive practices (paying apple to make google the default search) and one of the recommended remedies was selling off chrome. The judge didn't go through with this, likely because in the case they note that people voluntarily really like using chrome, because "edge is the default windows browser that people seem to use only to download chrome".
Time for more security researchers to collect more money on data exfiltration reports when attackers instruct and trick LLMs to steal private user information and fall for fake websites generated by AI to accidentally send private information to attackers.
Chromium has been building APIs to support fetching on device models so that Chrome can fetch Gemini-nano to run locally. I'm not familiar if nwjs has any plans to do something with that functionality or not though.
> Gemini in Chrome is rolling out to all eligible Mac and Windows users in the US who have their Chrome language set to English. We look forward to bringing this feature to more people and additional languages soon
Chrome dev console has Gemini integrated as well. Otherwise pick any coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, opencode, ...) give it the Playwright MCP and ask away.
That trick will work on android until one day google decides to ban all other browsers from it.
iOS locks you down to safari already.
Then web attestation and platform attestation/drm for mobile apps is eventually firmly in place and it means you can only use either android or ios for paying your bills (already a thing for most banks where I live...) or even doing mundane government bureaucracy.
god, what a timeline... and even if you don't live in the country responsible for this mess you still have to suffer these consequences and everyone is so apathetic and shuts their brains off when mentioning any of these problems.
Blah. On the one hand, this is where the monopoly power of putting Gemini in Chrome should be looked into by the DOJ. On the other hand, this might make me switch back to chrome.
These are all things Apple could build into safari, but they're nowhere to be seen. They'll be stuck solving yesterday's problems (like building an infinitesimally better camera for the latest iPhone), but not at all integrating any AI into them.
The problem with that is Google has burned so many bridges with users over the past couple of decades that moving off the ad model to some sort of paid subscription service is going to be next to impossible. People just don't trust Google any more. I know many people who happily pay OpenAI every month but wouldn't pay the same for Google Gemini even if it was better.
Not to mention that actually giving Google money for anything other than an in-app purchase is oddly hard work - try buying a Google business subscription and behold an interface worse than AWS's console. Google has so much catching up to do that it's conceivable that they'll eventually fail.
This is why other "AI browsers" that parse and simplify the DOM, then invoke a tool-calling LLM over text are at EOL.
Once Chrome integrates Gemini Live amd treats your browser as a video input stream, it's pixels all the way. No lag, no incorrect clicks on hidden elements.
Summarizing a long article (possibly in a language I don't speak), querying it for specific information without having to come up with an exact greppable substring etc. is absolute what web browsers are for.
How is this not stealing clicks from other web pages and advertisers? There is no way that people are forgoing clicking on links at this point if they get the answers right away.
Honestly, it would be great if it were "Gemma in Chrome" instead.
A local model capable enough to do the things that this is designed to do? Yes please.
Gemini in Chrome is a way to increase adoption. Gemma in Chrome is an innovation - a platform that allows developers to build stuff leveraging the local model. A step closer to a world where we can talk to our computers and have them do what we mean instead of what we say.
Google's strategic execution with Gemini over the last two quarters has been impressive. Its deep integration into core products—from the consumer-facing Workspace and Search to developer platforms like Google Cloud and Colab—demonstrates a cohesive, ecosystem-wide approach.
This period marks Google's transition from a preparatory phase to an aggressive market push, which is thus far yielding significant momentum.
This contrasts with the apparent friction in the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership, where long-term strategic alignment seems uncertain. Furthermore, there's a growing perception that competitors like Anthropic are achieving superior performance in specialized domains like software engineering. This suggests OpenAI's current model, which appears heavily focused on optimizing its existing architecture, may be approaching diminishing returns on genuine innovation.
I spent 10 mins trying to find a clear statement of whether Google uses information submitted to Gemini for training and I couldn't find one. It is hard not to come to the conclusion they actively try to obfuscate it because there are many statements that vaguely sound like they should address it but then don't properly do that.
So I would have to suggest, use these features with extreme caution on any page you consider private if you aren't prepared for your private information to get sucked into Google's Gemini training data.
It's right there in the privacy center. The answer is quite unambiguously yes by the way. (This is for the Gemini app):
"How your data is used Google uses this data, as described in our Privacy Policy, to:
Provide our services Maintain and improve our services Develop new services Personalise our services (learn more) Customise our services Communicate with you Measure performance Protect Google, our users and the public
These uses extend to the generative AI models and other machine-learning technologies powering our services."
I find that answer ambiguous.
Does "Maintain and improve our services" mean "any private web page you ask Gemini about will be dumped into our training data"?
I've still not seen a solid answer to that from any of the AI labs that use language of that nature.
The wording is intentionally broader than just training. It encompasses training and anything else they want to do with your data in the name of "maintain and improve our services".
Safe to assume they will use your data for pretty much anything they can, including model training.
When you go to the Gemini in Chrome section on the same privacy page it states:
'When you use the Gemini in Chrome feature, Gemini collects and processes page content and the URL from the browser tab you’re viewing by default. Some of the page content Gemini uses might not be visible to you."
I think they're being reasonably explicit about what they're doing.
Note: I'm in the EU so not sure if this is what's shown everywhere else.
I don't think there is anything ambiguous about it. How else are they going to "personalize" their services, if they don't consume your personal data?
If I am looking at a web page that shows me my own API keys for a service in plain text, and I accidentally click the Gemini button while viewing that page, is there a chance that someone in six months time might ask Gemini for an API key for that service and have mine returned to them?
I'd love to get a confident answer to that question.
The parent comment has a point. A layperson (or at least many people not read into this topic) isn't going to read the language in that privacy policy and come to the conclusion that "any private web page you ask Gemini about will be dumped into our training data". The text on Google's privacy page could absolutely be made more explicit.
I'm sceptical a layperson will understand or care what it means that their data will be used in training. If you are concerned about such things this heavily implies you don't want to share your data. Just don't agree to the terms and move on.
Why not assume yes?
lol any answer to “do we use your data” that isn’t “no” is a yes
We had legal trying to figure out if data submitted to Google Cloud was shared with Google, and the conclusion was that it is unclear from their TOS. Their TOS is a bunch of circular references to different agreements.
I think it goes without saying that anything Google provides for free, they do it to garner user data. Traditional search is dying. And so is the advertising that comes with it. They are finding alternatives. They'll keep "injecting" themselves into everything we use regularly. Ads will get even more targeted... much more contextual in realtime.
I simply don't use Gemini.
I never asked for it, or agreed to anything having to do with it. I'm pissed off to find it bound to a hotkey or gesture on my phone (I'm still not clear what the actual gesture is that keeps invoking the damn thing).
The more unsolicited crap Google jams down the pipe at me, the sooner they're going to discover I'm not at the other end and the pipe feeds straight into a septic field.
If anyone from Google is reading this, I hope you're ashamed of your dark patterns. You used to be a testament to the ideal of putting the user first. Now I can't distinguish you from any other crummy, misleading, self-serving tech gorilla.
This is the problem with being the biggest in X. Facebook desperately tried to branch out: phones, video, VR... Eventually the only thing that worked was buying other social media companies.
Google is in the same position, yes they have Android, GCP, Gmail/work suite, etc but even all of that combined couldn't sustain the moloch.
Exactly.
These insane levels of revenue streams cannot be sustained with just one product for longer periods of time. Eventually, every one of these biggest X'es will need to branch out to different industries/domains to sustain those levels.
If Google had simply stuck at what they used to be, a solid search engine with some unobtrusive ads plus some other ancillary services, they could have sustained that more or less indefinitely. What can't be sustained is the endless growth that the stock market demands. If you dare to say "you know what, this is probably enough" you'll be immediately punished by the market.
We are seeing the counter proof right now. Search in itself isn't sustainable. The concept is challenged by GenAI-based approaches.
Of course they are not a 1:1 replacement, but for the first time we see Google's model being challenged and them having to defend, which they do by trying to drive competition of by integrating genai into their products. Once the competition is gone, they can reconsider.
There’s plenty of services that they could have gone into and charged money for.
I think this is true for all of the big orgs.
Main difference is that Google is bad at monitising any (non advertising) service; so free becomes the main proposition.
Is Meta much different though?
Google's non-advertising revenue is about $25B/quarter. There's only a handful of tech companies with higher revenue than that.
It is for example a bit more than Tesla, double that of Broadcom or Oracle, a bit less than Dell or TSMC.
Seems they're actually pretty good at monetizing non-ads goods and services at this point.
A good point, but I still think they're struggling to innovate.
Their advertising revenue is over $71B/quarter.
As far as I know the majority of the non advertising revenue is from Google Cloud and subscriptions for services.
Most of the interesting product initiatives they've launched (that I can think of) have folded.
They are definitely capable of writing such statements, which you can see in their enterprise products. In my Google Workspace gemini app it says pretty prominently and clearly:
The Google Workspace privacy hub is similarly easy to read and clear that they don't train on your data: https://support.google.com/a/answer/15706919So they definitely understand that people want to hear that their data isn't being used for training, and they know how to say it clearly and reassuringly. Which makes the omission of that in their consumer products more telling in my view.
Haha, but do they paraphrase your chats, and use it for training? (Ye$)
So, naive question: If you click this button while looking at your bank account or, say, a mortgage application form, or a government website where you're paying taxes, etc... is all your form input literally just sucked into some insecure dataset in the cloud used for training Gemini?
I would assume they keep it secure as far as the training data goes, I don't have too many doubts about that.
But aside from that part, yes, I can't see how you could make a different assumption.
I think if Google trained current models on private data, confidential info would leak constantly, it would be an absolute trainwreck. If Gemini leaked your Gmail and Chrome activity, Google would get sued and regulated into oblivion.
But Google needs to leave this option open in the future, in case they have to go all-in on an arms-race against China, if Chinese AI starts becoming an actual threat somehow. And it's easy to predict the USA gov would prioritize that race over privacy concerns.
For what it's worth, these are the current conditions under which it will be active:
* Be 18 or over and in the US.
* Use a Mac or Windows computer.
* Use the latest version of Chrome.
* Have Chrome’s language set to English (United States).
* Sign(ed) in to Chrome.
It's a test run. They will relax those conditions first chance they get.
As far as I can tell, Linux will remain not targeted by attempts to sponge off all kinds of user data. Which makes me so happy that I finally made the leap.
From what I heard it's only not on Linux yet because they've had some serious crashes due to incompatibility with Wayland. Don't worry, it'll come to Linux in time.
Thank you, thank you Wayland for being you.
firefox + DDG + linux + vpn is my preferred combo, or the 'privacy stack' as I like to call it.
> * Use a Mac or Windows computer
I wonder if Chromebooks fall under Linux
They definitely don’t fall under Mac or Windows, at least.
Could you please add:
* Opted in
(Or at least, "* Hasn't opted out")
This is literally the worst part of Gemini. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out if, and if so what, they are training on even with my stupid $250/mo subscription. It's totally opaque.
being privacy centric is a badge of honor these days, so if they aren't making it clear or not giving an easy to find option, then it's a guaranteed to your queries and outputs are used for training.
Or course they are using it. With Google even this keyboard stroke on Android is used for something.
Ex-Googler here, at least in the UK, privacy was taken very seriously by all employees, we never collected data without explicit consent and never used it for anything but what the user granted permissions for.
Also ex, for a reason, everyone with ethics left, and Google “is a conventional company” now
Edit: reference https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/ipo-letter/#:~:tex...
Didn't Google release many data collection features as an "opt-out" setting (ie: without user consent)?
> privacy was taken very seriously by all employees, we never collected data without explicit consent and never used it for anything but what the user granted permissions for.
Except when you literally trick people into providing their data: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1664682689591377923 by pretending that your dark patterns are "explicit consent"
Or except when you literally trick people into providing their data by connecting totally unrelated services https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1908951546869498085 and you don't stop until the person gives up and submits to you.
Except when your own support explicitly says that your behaviour is tracked across completely unrelated Google services: https://x.com/TeamYouTube/status/1849952594992435493
Except when you literally sign people into user accounts automatically with most data collection options turned on.
Except...
This claim, without a source, runs the risk of being misinformation, which is a massive problem in 2025.
Can you provide a reliable source to verify it?
Federated Learning of Gboard Language Models with Differential Privacy
It's not nothing, but it's something. And, at least on my phone, it's not obvious if it can be turned off.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?lr&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=Fe...
You can always opt out of using gboard altogether.
FUTO Keyboard is quite nice.
Thanks for the suggestion. It supports multi-lingual typing which in a requirement for me. I haven't checked other keyboards for a long time so perhaps that has become more common.
The integration with whisper is nice too.
I don't find the multilingual features as polished as Gboard, this is what prevents me from switching, in Gboard you can install multiple languages and write without having to switch and it will provide autosuggestions and spelling support based on the language you're typing without having to manually change the language
Heliboard is another good one: https://github.com/Helium314/HeliBoard
Any recommendations on android keyboards?
I recommended FUTO keyboard in sibling comment. FlorisBoard is a nice FOSS option, but some features are still WIP. Personally, I've switched fully to ThumbKey, but that's got quite a learning curve.
https://research.google/pubs/federated-learning-for-mobile-k...
Thanks for getting ahead of me. I add their competitor MS doing the same even more openly:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/microsoft-swiftkey...
Always assume companies will gather, use and share your data in all ways they legally can. The burden of proof is never on the user that companies don't milk us. Calling it "misinformation" as someone further above did is bizarre. This is the default business model of big tech.
Phew, thank goodness someone policed this HN comment's quip about a multi-billion dollar company. May I recommend a more ambitious target in your war on misinformation next?
Whether it's aimed at large companies or not, I'd still rather not see misinformation spread. People already have poor enough understandings of what companies actually do and don't collect. There exists ongoing conspiracy theories that phones actively listen to conversations while in your pocket, despite there being no evidence to such a claim.
Facts do matter, and I appreciate those that make an effort to state them correctly.
Yeah, the facts were stated correctly. They just didn't provide a source. That doesn't make it misinformation. It means it's a claim without a source.
But to answer the question, Gboard absolutely uses your data. And it's right there in its privacy policy.
Misinformation isn't more or less appropriate depending on the target.
Google generally uses data from free users to train ML models etc., but no data from paying customers. I don't have a link to back it up though.
They do, even when you pay for gemini pro/ultra.
they obvuscate it with legal nonsense
So you click a button, it pops open a text box in a floating window, you type in a question, and the AI replies. This is the most underwhelming implementation of browser-based AI that they could have come up with. Quite literally just gemini.google.com in an iFrame.
> Quite literally just gemini.google.com in an iFrame.
Hmm, no? It has access to all of the content of all of you're currently open tabs, and is able to parse images on web pages as well.
It would be neat if it could also browse on your behalf, but that would present all kinds of security risks.
No, it can only access the tab you are currently on. And that too just the content that is already available. It can't scroll up and down to load more. It can't follow links. It can't run any actions. You'll get a ton more functionality by just taking a screenshot of the page yourself and pasting it in ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini.
I'm sure that kind of functionality is coming. There's a lot of activity in the chromium repo (chrome/browser/actor/tools) that appears to be adding support for that sort of orchestration.
Ok cool.
But whats the vision of this? Where are they trying to take the customer?
I feel like this issue relates back to the origin of Google (search) in the first place. It was borne out of a technology in which the founders did not envision what it would become. It seems the firm just tries ideas and then tries to figure out where it goes - thats the culture. And unsurprisingly, yields a lot of failiures.
In contrast, Apples approach yields a much higher rate of success with less risk.
I feel the same about Firefox's vision, although I admit I haven't tried it. Often when I visit a place like chat.mistral.ai Firefox gives a weird popup that says something about "don't you wish you didn't have to open this in a tab?" Like is that their AI vision? Saving me a tab?
Ive come to realise the constraint on innovation et al is not external resources - its what comes from within. Imagination.
We're too lazy to browse now, that we need machines to do it?
When every goddamn webpage presents itself to me like this: https://i.imgur.com/mMi8an3.png
I do need machines to do the browsing for me.
You might want to explore ad, script and popup blockers(EG: no script, ad block plus, ghostery).
They exist for that very reason, the web is much friendlier.
No no no we don't need a sustainable answer to the cancer of ads on the internet, that would break capitalism and send the world sliding into chaos! No, see, what we need is AI in our browsers. That is going to transform things.
I don’t think that website actually wants you to be here, it looks like it’s trying to get you to leave.
You need an ad blocker badly lol
The idea is you could ask a to browser to do things like operate on multiple websites to do boring stuff, e.g. cross check phone reviews across sites x y and z.
I 100% don't feel comfortable letting my browser work alone, but "agentic browsers" are a thing some people want and/or are building.
A small part of me wants this to spectacularly succeed so I can stop using whatever the army of figma designers wishes to force down my throat when most things I need could be spreadsheets with a few buttons with macros hooked up.
It makes sense as an avenue for Agents as well, since it is the defacto "work app" platform. For many, their entire workday is spent inside the browser.
It’s not browsing we are lazy at. It’s parsing through ton of results until we find what we were looking for.
>It has access to all of the content of all of your currently open tabs
This is supposed to be a good feature? Not a privacy nightmare?
Likely depends on whether or not its opt-in. If Gemini only gets page content when you ask it to then that's fine.
Of course, it should also be possible to completely disable Gemini so as to avoid accidentally sending it private browsing content.
> So you click a button, it pops open a text box in a floating window, you type in a question, and the AI replies. This is the most underwhelming implementation of browser-based AI that they could have come up with. Quite literally just gemini.google.com in an iFrame.
Well, they're gonna have to support an astronomical scale of queries - not many companies in the world are able to do it and Alphabet is doing it pretty much on their own stack of cloud, a.i chips and software. So sure, the front end is not a big deal but this is still a big move.
It has access to the current page, so you can ask Gemini questions about its content.
They took 1 step at a time instead of trying to take multiple steps at a time, how is that a bad thing. They're obviously getting things prep'd for Chrome agents and Gemini 3.
don't worry -- they have big plans!
https://research.google/blog/mechanism-design-for-large-lang...
I think it will be useful as a modernised ctrl+f
I stopped using Chrome when they started doing the "logged in to Chrome" thing for all Google services. It seemed likely a creepy step in a vaguely defined, unknown direction. The signal seems stronger now.
Left when they disabled uBlock Origin.
I was 60% Chrome and 40% Firefox, now I'm 99% Firefox and 1% Chromium.
Google's AI Studio does not always seem to work well in Firefox. That is my only usage on Chrome. On top of some web application testing.
Same. The removal of manifest V2 was one of the worst and most user hostile moves in a long time IMHO. Though the impending blocking of side loading and other locking down of Android stands to rival if not exceed it. Really dark times for Google
you don't need to be logged in atm, AFAIK
I believe they're talking about the mechanism where logging into Chrome automatically signs you into many of Google's services across the web.
What's wrong with that? That's the purpose of logging into chrome.
For me, the purpose of logging in to my Mozilla account in Firefox is to sync saved passwords and tabs between devices. If I was a Chrome user, I would want to log in to Chrome for the same reason.
The problem for me is the fusing of the browser with a preferred 'platform' of services. I don't want a partisan browser.
The purpose of logging into a browser has always been to synchronize bookmarks, settings, and extensions.
Chrome is a browser, not your Google account?
The future of web browsing is the tiktok model. Where you don't surf the web, but the web is served to you "algorithmically". Do it long enough, and you'll be serve the pages you want and it will feel like it was your idea all along. Gemini everywhere is the first step.
An infinite number of people at an infinite number of computers will eventually be served the content they desire.
I’d assume one step further, that the human-centric web isn’t what’s served to you, it’s just generative content created on the fly to suit your mood.
Think TikTok, except where the platform is both curator and creator.
Why stop there. Let the AI consume the content too, and then every day it can just serve a report saying that it consumed 1024 pieces of content and that this led to an increase in its satisfaction level.
Recording videos to send to our AI Tamagotchis so they don’t start complaining that they’re bored.
Lmao. No wonder Google fixed their bot views recently on YouTube. We're coming to this.
Oh, I just got this dystopian image in my mind where you don't even talk about memes from content made by humans anymore and all you get are weird themes inserted into your custom generated content.
So just like how we don't watch the same thing at the same time anymore due to on-demand media, and the talking about yesterday's big TV show is only a thing of the past now. It will be one more step removed from that and you will have kids talking about this random thing that appeared in their custom show yesterday. Conversations like "dude, did you also get that singing toilet in your stream yesterday, what was that about".
Or you will get the pages that are good enough to hold your attention, while being short form enough to keep giving you small constant dopamine hits. Nothing too interesting or too long, keeping you chasing more hits, to prevent you from feeling like you really "finished" something significant, since that might feel like a stopping place and cause you to go do something else.
I wouldn't gave a major problem with this if the algorithms were tuned to my benefit. In fact, I probably prefer it since most of the web is noise that I don't need to see. So the problem isn't algorithmic content, it's closed source algorithms designed to benefit the company that made them rather than the user.
> I wouldn't gave a major problem with this if the algorithms were tuned to my benefit.
Due to the laws of enshittification they will eventually never be tuned to your benefit.
Maybe, but that sounds a lot like Google Discover, which is part of Android, the Chrome new tab page and (sometimes?) the Google home page.
Google Discover is also remarkably bad at serving me stories I want to read, at least in my experience. One of those products that I wished worked better.
That's arguably not browsing the web, that's watching TV.
Nothing wrong with that, in theory and in moderation.
No, that doesn't make any sense, because the web is not a social media.
For most humans, it is.
That’s the future if we leave it to the tech bros. As humans we can and should do better though.
i legitimately miss stumbleupon.
This seems ridiculously simple. It doesn’t browse for you in the background or lets you reference tabs etc. This just seems to pass the current page to an llm.
I built an extension like this with Claude-code a few days ago because I wanted to see if I could replace the ai feature of Firefox when I switched to LibreWolf. Turns out, it was quite easy for Claude code.
I want a bit further and tried to get the extension to browse around. Individual actions worked, but I couldn’t get it to follow a plan. In the end I finally looked around the code and Claude had made a huge mess with cursor etc.
The complexity of handling the array of messages was a bit too much for the AI agents.
I now have the same as this Gemini ai though and it CAN click links and it works with ollama too. So more private.
All in a few hours of development.
So I am not impressed by Google here
If I recall correctly, the main selling point of Firefox AI is that it's offline by default, which means that it doesn't rack up your token bill and doesn't expose your data.
No, Firefox out of the box has an AI side panel with options to use Claude. Most machines won't run a good enough local model so they don't default to that.
Firefox does several other things with AI too, and many of them locally, e.g. suggesting tab group names, suggesting other tabs to add to existing groups, auto-generating alt texts for images pasted into edited PDFs – each supported by a dedicated local model!
You can see which ones your Firefox installation has already fetched and their purpose on about:addons.
More about this here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/on-device-models
On top of that, current mobile versions (and weirdly enough only mobile versions) can now also summarize articles using Apple Intelligence (where available) or Mozilla-hosted remote inference: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/shake-to-summarize/
> So I am not impressed by Google here
I imagine google has to build something that works for basically every kind of user out there, vs what you built. Moreover, it’s self obvious that they would support Gemini but not ollama, again given most users cannot run beefy LLMs on their consumer devices.
> It doesn’t browse for you
I would hope not
Similar threads today, sorted by number of comments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292260
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292163
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292637
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45296416
A danger with google is how flippantly they will ban google accounts for the dumbest things. Now theres a button to livesteam your browsing tied to your google account. I wonder how many people are going to lose 20 years of gmail Gphotos and GDrive files because they accidentally clicked gemini at the wrong moment on the wrong website.
I saw the new before I sleep, and slepped peacefully. Because I'd already switched to brave 2 years ago. And once more to firefox 2 months ago. With firefox I feel I finally own my browser and no company is gonna push things down my throat I didn't first agree to
You might want to check Firefox' telemetry settings if you care about privacy. Or you can use Librewolf, it's an extension-compatible FF fork with privacy turned on.
Librewolf is great, but from my experience the default settings are painful for daily use. My biggest gripe is the auto-clear cookies on restart. I understand why it could be useful to some users, but for most I doubt they'd want that in a daily browser. This makes Librewolf need tweaking just as much as Firefox does which kind of ruins the point of it in my experience. (although you are tweaking for usability rather than privacy)
It's just a simple one-time tweak under settings to halt clearing cookies upon browser restart.
Clearing cookies automatically is good for your privacy though and is a sensible default for a "hardened" configuration. If you use the password manager logging in again when you want to shouldn't be an issue.
It’s a hassle for 99% of the population, even with a password manager.
The danger with google is that they suck at user experience
Does Apple do this often? I've always wondered if iCloud is worth getting, given that it constantly spams me to use it with my iPhone
If they do close an account they have a support line you can call and talk to a human.
For what it's worth, Apple closed my mom's account due to inactivity. (She hadn't used an Apple product since 2007.)
They do have phone support, but they refused to unlock the account and just said she'll never be able to use primary email account with Apple's systems because of the frozen account.
So yes, any cloud provider can lock you out for arbitrary reasons. Just because they answer the phone doesn't mean the customer support agent can actually do anything about it.
At $1 / month having 50GB end-to-end encrypted storage and hide-my-email is reasonable in case your choice is better privacy over controlling your own mail domain.
Photos sync to iCloud is terrible slow though compared to Google Photos - syncing 100GB take days and 500GB takes forever. At least it end-to-end encrypted with Avanced Data Protection. But yeah if you multi-TB photo archive buying large storage options of iCloud make no sense simply because it's impossible to use.
I'd better use self-hosted Immich.
It has great features otherwise, I have like 100+ aliases with Hide My Email. You don't even need to use iCloud email with it.
Wait, how does this footgun work?
Ah, the ol' Dropbox risk management tactic where they show you a random selection of your photos when you open the page. Or any page on the site. Suggested: "Remembering Summer Vacation 2020". By the way, do you want to compress your whole photo library to achieve Instagram quality while offering to consume more of the photos of your computer, disillusioned by the last few pennies of value that already fell. What's that? Your iCloud or Android device is out of space because the two ProRes videos your iPhone took after the commercial convinced the Apple user to engage the Apple proprietary video encoding button to maximize their Instagram engagement. The Samsung folds itself into a rolly-polly bug shell form. Eventually, all of your photos will be sent to Instagram, the final destination. Once there, after compressing your photos without asking, they will insist on your choosing ZSTD as the coffin.
So, on the consent-quality-useful triangle (WIP), Google is clearly eliminating quality and consent to provide you with a useful interface to the Google consentless compression box. Just what everyone wanted. The future is now.
Notification: You have 2 new views (details button: 2 ad-consenting views, 0 other views) on the photo you took of the compression artifact on a video that you suspect Google might have accidentally compressed without your consent, confusing itself to be Instagram. Unfortunately, your comparison photo gets equally confused and is compressed to be equally as bad as the compressed one. Now the photos look identical, and you look like a conspiracy theorist tweeting about "video encoding" from your Sesame Street Elmo phone, just like everyone else, with no issue at all. "We're in the Ourobouros. Maybe Paramount isn't the issue. Maybe it's Paramount Plus." The Samsung rolly-polly bug interrupts and insists this issue will have to wait because it's 2pm on Friday. Now, your Elmo phone is now the only device still working in the office, as you try to convince your wife why you have to stay late, "Because you're different than the rest of the people posting compression artifact-laden photos."
[flagged]
Google wiped my account for posting a jpeg of a credit card form with "THIS POST ONLY VIEWABLE WITH GOOGLE+ GOLD" to their old social media site. Gmail,Gdrive, everything tied to the account gone forever. They would only tell me it got flagged "phishing". The TOS has a laundry list of words to ban you under. Whichever reason their overseas moderation farm clicks, after looking 0.7 seconds at a screengrab flagged by a hallucinating AI, isn't ever going to be reviewed by anyone further. There's no support or appeal path for a free account.
The line might be at least a tiny bit fuzzy: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil...
Except people take photos of their kids all the time and there is precedent of parents losing their Google accounts for this.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-cs...
If the forced deprecation of Ublock wasn't enough to get me off Chrome, this sure as hell is.
I was really upset when I found out that my $20 a month Gemini AI Pro subscription only only included privacy features if stopped using the chat history feature.
Gosh I hate google products.
They just introduced endless nagging in AI Studio to enable Drive integration, if you disallowed it. They really want your data!
If your data is already in Drive haven't you already given them it?
It isn't because I have never enabled the feature? All the sessions have been temporary. Now it started complaining about that. It didn't do that before.
> Assouvissez votre créativité sans changer de page
> Have a question about what you're reading? Ask Gemini. It uses the context of your open tabs to provide relevant answers and explanations, keeping you focused.
In France some bits of the page are localized, some are still in English -- doesn't project professionalism or inspire confidence.
Ils avaient probablement dépassé leur quota de tokens pour faire traduire la page par Gemini...
I don’t understand who this is for? I just tried Anthropic’s extension and it feels like writing automated selenium tests.
LLMs interacting with markup is not the best abstraction layer.
It sounds like an alternative for passing a URL to a chat session, with the advantage that you could share web pages that require a log in.
But you might want to be careful about which web pages you share this way?
Right it felt pretty bad. It chugs tons of tokens just to be like "I need to scroll up!". Then 5 seconds later it scrolls up, chugs more tokens. "I need to scroll up more!"
It’s for Google to gain complete control of the context whereever you are on the Internet
Google would control everything if they could, but this won’t achieve that and they know that so it’s not the specific intention of this. Even if you’re feeling doomerish about it.
Ok dude
My theory is that Google wants to bake Gemini into Chrome to preempt a future antitrust ruling ordering them to spin the browser out, for the same reason Microsoft made IE an integral part of Windows 98.
Don't have to worry about scraping rules when your end users ship all the data to you "to ask questions".
That is why every AI company is making a browser.
For one second, I thought Chrome now supported the Gemini protocol. Then I came back to reality.
> To use Gemini in Chrome on your computer, you need to: Be 18 or over and in the US. Use a Mac or Windows computer. Use the latest version of Chrome. Learn how to update Chrome. Sign in to Chrome. This feature isn’t available in Incognito mode. Learn how to sign in to Chrome. Have Chrome’s language set to English (United States).
Why can't I set Chrome to whichever language I may want and still have that Gemini thing in english?
Yeah, let's have a do-over of this thread. Nice.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292260
Maybe someone can post the change log tomorrow and we can do it again.
I'm thinking over the weekend we could post the GitHub merge of these AI features so we can give Google even more exposure.
By Tuesday I hope someone will write a review of these features rehashing the same thing. I'd love to have that be upvoted to the top of HN again.
Microsoft baked in Copilot into Edge more than a year ago.
It was forced into Windows task bar as well.
This seems to be in the same vein.
Use macOS or Linux, don’t use chrome. The are getting tinier everyday.
Much longer actually, Bing Chat in Edge came out more than 2+ years ago.
I hereby declare this to be the future! We made it folks. Time to pack it up. See you in a 2002 LAN party.
Count me in! Do you have one of those fancy things called „hubs“ or „switches“ or are we going BNC with terminators?
I have a D25 Laplink Cable somewhere and maybe even a copy of Netware 4.
Yep. Real "metaverse" energy.
What is LAN?
Baby don't hurt me
> What is LAN?
I think it's like the opposite of WAN? :shrug:
> Your web, your control
Typical corporate doublespeak. The web is neither "mine", nor am I ever in control. If anything, the web belongs to corporations like Google. By integrating their text prediction, summarization, and hallucination engine into their web browser, they're further cementing their position of control.
I tried it on this page and says 'I don't have access' [0].
[0] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Nx4gJA-qWodYWm-SK87Aa63i_jF...
You need to do it via Gemini in Chrome in an updated Chrome install (roughly 140.0.7339.186 or newer) on Mac/Windows using the English language with the relevant permissions enabled in the sections under chrome://settings/ai
My guess is it's either the first part (doing it via Gemini in Chrome) or the last part (permissions enabled).
I typed @gemini in the searchbar and it turned blue and text switched to 'Ask Gemini' to indicate it worked (but it didn't work - Gemini says it doesn't have access to the screen/webpage).
chrome://settings/ai redirects to chrome://settings (general settings). Manually searching 'ai' brings up dozens of other settings - stuff like 'mail' (which contains 'ai' string) - but nothing Gemini-related.
On the most up to date chrome: Version 140.0.7339.186 (Official Build) (arm64)
The instructional video [0] says there should be a 'Gemini' icon on the top of the Chrome browser, but I don't have one (macOS). (do I have to have a paid Gemini account for it to be there?).
In any case, when OpenAI and Grok launch things, I usually just go and try them in about 20 seconds. By comparison Google's AI launches are tedious..
(thanks for the help btw)
[0] https://gemini.google/overview/gemini-in-chrome/
The "Ask Gemini" thing existed before this, between that and the lack of an AI settings page it seems it's not considering the system as one of the initial supported ones (but why specifically I'm not sure).
I can confirm a paid Gemini account is not [corrected] needed.
No problem, it took me a minute to get it enabled myself - not sure why it's so special cased for what it is.
> I can confirm a paid Gemini account is needed.
Google should say this up front (or at least prompt that I need to pay) rather than wasting users' time.
The 'How do I use Gemini in Chrome?' section of their launch page doesn't say anything about that requirement either.
Anyway, </rant>. Thanks for your help.
My apologize, I swear I tried to type "is not needed" but must have completely brain farted.
To reclarify: A paid account is NOT needed. I do not have one and it works. Do note the page says a US based Google account is needed though, it just doesn't need to be a paid gemini account.
I asked Gemini and it may says you need a US based Google account:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZifoxoUSy1vEgh2Qx8GaCsb5ywE...
Isn't Google putting AI results at the top some sort of conflict of interest?
Like if users can just get the info they want right at Google.com why would they click through to any of the search results? Isn't that stealing clicks from websites?
Stealing clicks? What obligation does Google have to send traffic to a site?
What if that site paid for ads or to appear at the top of search results? Google's AI crap appears above even sponsored sites.
I mean, is anyone really surprised that this was going to happen?
Google is about to break even further away in the LLM race with this move, seeing as they will be getting an absolutely, supremely stunning amount of regular and novel data 24/7. Not everyone uses dedicated LLM interfaces, but more people I know use Google search. As Google === Search for so many.
Nevertheless, it is an business savvy move to make, considering the recent ruling by the judge to not force Google to split apart or break up its business w/r/t to Chrome.
What does this mean for publishers and SEO, if AI starts answering questions directly in Chrome instead of sending traffic?
What do you think this will mean for OpenAI, Anthropic and their current valuations?
I bet the judge already realizes how mistaken he was to let them off. Now they'll use their monopoly product to ensure monopoly control in the new market he was so sure would rein them in.
The thing about chrome is that people use it because they like it. It's not forced or bundled with windows or iOS.
A monopoly is when you do anti-competitive things, not when your product is far and away the most popular.
If anything blame Firefox for dropping the ball so damn hard
The differences between Chrome and Firefox are too minimal to chalk up Chrome's market share to preference. From 2008-2010 maybe, but Chrome established such a lead in that time that its inertia (and Chromebooks) did the rest.
This is... a woefully uninformed statement. You realize they just lost several monopoly cases, including around Chrome? They just got off on the meaningful penalty.
Google is an anticompetitive monopoly, and Chrome is an anticompetitive monopoly. This has been established by multiple courts of law. Your armchair claims to the contrary hold no water.
My friend, I suggest reading the actual lawsuit and rulings before commenting.
The case ruled that google search was a monopoly for using anti-competitive practices (paying apple to make google the default search) and one of the recommended remedies was selling off chrome. The judge didn't go through with this, likely because in the case they note that people voluntarily really like using chrome, because "edge is the default windows browser that people seem to use only to download chrome".
Check the chair you are in before speaking.
How do you turn it off?
Firefox/brave/orion/vivaldi/safari/librewolf/etc
Admittedly some of them have their own AI offerings but not as invasive and can actually be turned off.
chrome://settings/ai
Google taking advantage of their anti competitive monopolies
Time for more security researchers to collect more money on data exfiltration reports when attackers instruct and trick LLMs to steal private user information and fall for fake websites generated by AI to accidentally send private information to attackers.
Welcome to the Vibe Browsing security nightmare.
Does anyone know if they are embedding Gemini in chromium and will it eventually be available in nwjs?
Chromium has been building APIs to support fetching on device models so that Chrome can fetch Gemini-nano to run locally. I'm not familiar if nwjs has any plans to do something with that functionality or not though.
> Gemini in Chrome is rolling out to all eligible Mac and Windows users in the US who have their Chrome language set to English. We look forward to bringing this feature to more people and additional languages soon
Knew this was coming thanks to their chrome API's for on-device gen-AI (summarize, translate, generate, etc).
I'm surprised this didn't happen sooner... The amount of data available from Chrome users seems enormous.
I hope Brave deletes this from Chromium if it's present in the source code.
One thing apple should do is to allow you to chat with the Safari Reader summary to ask questions. The giant machine is too big to move fast.
Given this, i still won't use Chrome.
Tangential: Do you have any recommendations for webdev LLM tools?
I would like to inspect some part of the DOM and chat about it with an LLM, including the CSS rules that are applied to each subnode in my selection.
Chrome dev console has Gemini integrated as well. Otherwise pick any coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, opencode, ...) give it the Playwright MCP and ask away.
Who wants to bet that Chrome makes this feature impossible to disable?
I’ll take that bet. You will be able to disable it but that won’t mean they won’t still run it.
I'll take that bet too. You will always be able to disable it by not using Chrome.
That trick will work on android until one day google decides to ban all other browsers from it.
iOS locks you down to safari already.
Then web attestation and platform attestation/drm for mobile apps is eventually firmly in place and it means you can only use either android or ios for paying your bills (already a thing for most banks where I live...) or even doing mundane government bureaucracy.
god, what a timeline... and even if you don't live in the country responsible for this mess you still have to suffer these consequences and everyone is so apathetic and shuts their brains off when mentioning any of these problems.
"This will be so good, just wait! And until then, get used to it!", just like AGI and shitty chatbots that are subtly wrong most of the time.
Obvious mousetrap. Imagine shovelling all this stuff at users for "free". I'm switching to my own Chrominium builds...
Blah. On the one hand, this is where the monopoly power of putting Gemini in Chrome should be looked into by the DOJ. On the other hand, this might make me switch back to chrome.
These are all things Apple could build into safari, but they're nowhere to be seen. They'll be stuck solving yesterday's problems (like building an infinitesimally better camera for the latest iPhone), but not at all integrating any AI into them.
Google had to do this. They cannot die standing watching ChatGPT et. al. eating their ad-free lunch.
The problem with that is Google has burned so many bridges with users over the past couple of decades that moving off the ad model to some sort of paid subscription service is going to be next to impossible. People just don't trust Google any more. I know many people who happily pay OpenAI every month but wouldn't pay the same for Google Gemini even if it was better.
Not to mention that actually giving Google money for anything other than an in-app purchase is oddly hard work - try buying a Google business subscription and behold an interface worse than AWS's console. Google has so much catching up to do that it's conceivable that they'll eventually fail.
This is why other "AI browsers" that parse and simplify the DOM, then invoke a tool-calling LLM over text are at EOL.
Once Chrome integrates Gemini Live amd treats your browser as a video input stream, it's pixels all the way. No lag, no incorrect clicks on hidden elements.
Hopefully this will not affect other browser that are downstream of Chromium.
How do we get it out?
I would love to see usage metrics on that. Probably well below 1% of all browsing sessions, quite possibly even less than 0.1%.
Nobody asked to this. Interpreting websites for its users is categorically not what a web browser is for.
Summarizing a long article (possibly in a language I don't speak), querying it for specific information without having to come up with an exact greppable substring etc. is absolute what web browsers are for.
We need a [US Only] tag on the thread title, I almost got excited
Damn, the future is more and more distopic every day.
wondering if we can use it with playwright/puppeteer. would be a godsend for scrapers if they can identify useful data.
How is this not stealing clicks from other web pages and advertisers? There is no way that people are forgoing clicking on links at this point if they get the answers right away.
Given the current err climate of thought purity, doesn't this seem a little too risky of a product to enable?
I feel like we are past that point now. The fact that AI will get things wrong has been normalized already
Ok Google employees, please quit the vote brigading.
Inevitable.
Another reason to ditch Chrome. It's becoming an even more horrible bloatware.
Honestly, it would be great if it were "Gemma in Chrome" instead.
A local model capable enough to do the things that this is designed to do? Yes please.
Gemini in Chrome is a way to increase adoption. Gemma in Chrome is an innovation - a platform that allows developers to build stuff leveraging the local model. A step closer to a world where we can talk to our computers and have them do what we mean instead of what we say.
EU: Open goal and no keeper in sight. Just a small tab. Please.
[dead]
You didn't want it in your computer, bang, it's there!
You didn't want it in your phone, bang, it's there!
You didn't want it in your browser, bang, it's there!
Next, coming to a fridge near you! /s
Gilfoyle will sort that
> Next, coming to a fridge near you! /s
Well, with Samsung forcing ads on their "smart" fridges [0], Google + AI can't be far behind.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292666
Damn, not even a month after getting a butterfly kiss of a slap on the wrist for abusing their monopoly position... and they are already pulling this?
Thank god we have strong regulation in the US to protect us. /s
[dead]
Google's strategic execution with Gemini over the last two quarters has been impressive. Its deep integration into core products—from the consumer-facing Workspace and Search to developer platforms like Google Cloud and Colab—demonstrates a cohesive, ecosystem-wide approach.
This period marks Google's transition from a preparatory phase to an aggressive market push, which is thus far yielding significant momentum.
This contrasts with the apparent friction in the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership, where long-term strategic alignment seems uncertain. Furthermore, there's a growing perception that competitors like Anthropic are achieving superior performance in specialized domains like software engineering. This suggests OpenAI's current model, which appears heavily focused on optimizing its existing architecture, may be approaching diminishing returns on genuine innovation.