Remember when the entire selling point of Gmail was lots of storage and "no obtrusive ads like Yahoo Mail or Hotmail"? Pepperidge Farms remembers.
this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2026
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Google has turned its back on every single thing it use to stand for. Down to the “don’t be evil” slogan.
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Targeted advertising should be illegal. Solves a lot of problems. You can pick an ad based on its location (sports.example.com can have sports ads and astrology.example.com star ads), but not based on who's viewing it. Now there's less motivation to read all your personal information.
Agreed, targeted advertising and collecting private information about a person and storing it should be illegal. Decentralized systems, cryptocurrency or tokenized payments, and ephemeral order data that is wiped immediately after fulfillment should be standard. The Internet should be privacy focused.
You ever tried to enforce the changes needed to stop all of that tracking on a small group of friends/family? The number of people that actually like it as long as the down sides are not put in there face is wild.
I don't mean this as disagreement, just an interesting observation about people.
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Reminder that Immich has basically all the features of Google Photos and more, and you can migrate fairly easily by doing a Google Takeout.
https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/migrating-google-photos-to-immich-via-takeout
and if you can't selfhost, ente.io is also a good option. but it's a different software.
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I also made a tool with my brother to share photos with others in a trip:
https://github.com/Linkee12/PhotoBin
You can create a temporary album available for 30days, and everybody can share, select what they want to save and export. You can also put it on a VPS because it's E2E encrypted, the server doesn't see your photos.
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Users concerned about the latest privacy change can disconnect Gmail, Google Photos, and other connected apps from Personal Intelligence or disable Personalized Recommendations through their Google Account settings.
Most important part of the article.
Need a direct link or path... Going to hunt now.
Google account settings > data and privacy > Personalization settings > disable and delete all
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What a great reminder to turn off all those trackers. Thanks Lemmy!
I was thinking what a great reminder to take pictures with a camera not a phone.
To listen to music with a music player that has physical memory not cloud.
To keep things separate and private that you want to keep to yourself.
So glad I switched to immich
UGH FINE ASSHOLES I'LL DEGOOGLE
gonna take me like 15 minutes this is outrageous
Anyone happen to have a large repository of butthole pictures I can borrow?
I use this one on grindr.
For what I do understand is that they will use your pictures to serve you targeted ads to what you are interested of, if that's the case probably you'll get ads about butthole bleaching
Oh, I don’t mind all that. As long as I get the pictures.
I too am very interested in this.
This is also why I don’t trust Brave either. Any company that profits off an ad network and can change the rules whenever they want is dangerous. Even if Brave doesn’t do it now, doesn’t mean they won’t.
I already have a different email address. I just need an alternative to Google drive, and Google docs then, I can bail on Google forever. I'm so tired of Google doing evil and privacy invasive shit.
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If you want to take back control of your data, there are open source alternatives to almost every Google product
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Google using Gmail to target ads has been a thing since the launch, I remember the articles about it back in the day, and still got a Gmail since it was still soo much better than alternatives like Hotmail.
Anyone recommend a self hosted alternative to Google photos?
I know multiple people below you said Immich already but to give more details: it absolutely is one of the most well run and stable self hosted apps I own. Extremely reliable and works exactly as I need it. It was one of the first FOSS applications I supported monetarily because I believed in it so much.
Hands down immich.
There's multiple. Immich comes to mind
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Odd how these headlines always ramp up as Alphabet ( Google) approaches their quarterly earnings report.
Fucking hell. Time to take all the photos down. It's been at least a decade since a photo has been uploaded there, because I knew Google can't be trusted and I disabled the automatic upload, just hadn't taken the already uploaded images down. On top of that, for months I have been in the process of moving off gmail to Zoho Mail. Fuck Google.
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Huh. Shows you how cynical I am, I already thought they were doing this.
I got a year of @Thundermail.com for $72.00.
I use The Flatpak on my Desktop and grabbed it from F-Droid on my Pixel 10.
I don't even have Google Play Services installed on my daily driver/main profile. 🙃
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