Brought to you by a GrapheneOS fanboy.

This is one more good reason to never sign in on your android phone.

It's not as good as using graphene, but it's easier, less work, and you can't brick your phone.

The drawback, of course, is that you can't use your map, youtube or gmail account since signing in in any of those logs in the entire device.

But with microg, fdroid and aurora, it's very practical.

> Gemini now has a second set of toggles buried in its settings menu. You can go to Profile → Apps inside the Gemini app and manually disable access to Phone, Messages, WhatsApp, or Utilities. But these are turned on by default, even if you’ve disabled tracking in the past.

99% of the user's won't care and will actually find benefit in this sort of thing.

Personally I hate it, the struggle for any sort of privacy just got a lot harder on phones for me. PC/laptop is easy, I use Linux. But for phone I need to either pay for expensive hardware and risk bricking it to install something like grapheneOS or buy cheap and disable all the Google stuff I can.

The notification indeed says that even if you turned everything off, they will allow themselves in your messages, especially WhatsApp messages that are not normally part of Google or Android. And even if it looks like that the option to disable that exist, they don't tell you about that in the notification. It looks like that you have no choice.

To be clear, what I mean by that is that they only say: If you don’t want to use these features, you can turn them off in the Apps settings page.

But what it means "in the Apps" settings page? Does it means a settings in each individual app that my prostitute itself to Gemini?and if yes, which exact apps should I go to, to do this manual process that I don't asked for?

Since Google Assistant is going away I think this is an improvement for people who want to keep activity tracking off.

It would also be better if you could create calendar events from the web version of Gemini with activity tracking off so you aren't punished for not letting Google train Gemini on your data imo.

As generative AI becomes harder to ignore, broader in scope, and even more dominant as a business trend… the people whose jobs are to write about how generative AI affects our lives have just had enough. They’re smart enough to see the writing on the wall, and now they’re trying desperately to transfer that writing onto their pages.