A Developer Accidentally Found #CSAM in #AI Data. #Google #Banned Him For It

Google suspended a mobile app developer’s accts after he uploaded AI #training data to his #GoogleDrive. Unbeknownst to him, the widely used dataset, which is cited in a number of academic papers & distributed via an #academic file sharing site, contained child #sexualAbuse material. The developer reported the dataset to a child safety org, which eventually resulted in the dataset’s removal

https://www.404media.co/a-developer-accidentally-found-csam-in-ai-data-google-banned-him-for-it/

Reminder that there is a whole load of info out there that #Google essentially hides from you…some useful search tools that I remember using some of back in the days when I was a university research administrator, especially http://repec.org

Meine gefühlt größte Hürde auf dem Weg in die digitale Unabhängigkeit ist meine riesige Bildersammlung in der Google Fotos Cloud. Jetzt geh' ich das an. In Google Takeout mit ein paar Klicks ein Takeout beantragen, 2 Tage später eine Mail von Google: Alle Daten sind in 4GB zip-Dateien verpackt und stehen eine Woche lang zum download bereit. Das geht einfacher als gedacht. Super!
#Google #UnplugUSA

Alt...

Screenshot von Google Takeout. 127GB Daten stehen zum Download bereit. Die Datenpakete heißen "Teil1, 2, 3..."

#Google #discrimination #lawsuits

'If finally approved, the settlement would provide compensation to more than 4,000 current and former Black Google employees who worked in California and New York between 2017 and 2023.'

https://www.courthousenews.com/black-google-workers-one-step-closer-to-50-million-settlement-in-discrimination-lawsuit/

Just FYI, a FAQ we receive:
Why are you only on #Mastodon? Our answer is usually we don't respect or trust companies like #Meta and have tight limits with #Google.

And for those who have pitched us #Bluesky, our answer has been we do not consider it a worthy platform for our content. People forgot who endorsed #Musk taking over #Twitter?

We're a small team, and our principles on social media are in sync.

We are grateful for the support we have received from the #fediverse. ❤️

Support #PeerTube

Google has fully capitulated to Trump and is actively protecting human rights violators and war crimes perpetrators from accountability.

“It is outrageous that YouTube is furthering the Trump administration’s agenda to remove evidence of human rights violations and war crimes from public view”

@palestine

https://theintercept.com/2025/11/04/youtube-google-israel-palestine-human-rights-censorship

#google #youtube #censorship #genocide #warcrimes #humanrights #journalism #freepalestine

In the spirit of #FOSDEM2026 being sponsored by Google, I hope HackerTrain is brought to you by Ryanair.

#google #surveillanceCapitalism #BigTech #FOSDEM https://toot.si/@hook/115662561290957296

Good catch @aral! #Google does like free and open source, but only if they can exploit it.

Quote: "Google believes that open source is good for everyone. By being open and freely available, it enables and encourages collaboration and the development of technology"
–@fosdem

Really? Then Google should be open to #AGPL licences—which they notoriously hate: https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl-policy

Worrying if Google can influence/censor #FOSDEM as a sponsor, in the same way advertisers do for journals

#FOSS #GPL

"The Dutch government has quietly removed #Google #tracking tools from job listings for its intelligence services over concerns that the data would expose aspirant spies to U.S. #surveillance," according to POLITICO.

"The intervention would put an end to Google’s processing of the data of job seekers interested in applying to #spy service jobs, after members of parliament in The Hague raised security concerns." 💥

Everything has gone to...

In January 2023, @pluralistic used the term "enshittification" on his blog, pluralistic.net, to describe the deterioration process of the TikTok network.

Enshittification consists of four stages:

1. Platforms are good for users

2. Platforms abuse users to be good for business customers

3. Platforms abuse business customers to keep all the profit

4. Platforms die

🧵

#thread

#socialmedia #platforms #fediverse #activitypub #google #amazon #microsoft #enshittification

#Android is dead and we’d better all leave the ship before it sinks entirely.

Earlier this year #Google already took bold steps in moving the development of several AOSP components behind closed doors, removing the open-source foundations of the project one component at the time.

Options to unlock bootloaders on Android devices are also narrowing down. Xiaomi removed the ability to unlock the bootloader entirely in MIUI in August (after months spent making it ridiculously difficult), same for OnePlus, Samsung did so in July, and probably Google devices will soon follow suit.

And let’s not mention the nightmare of the Play Integrity API that forces all Android developers to register through the Play Store and use Google’s signing keys, even if they don’t intend to distribute their apps through it.

Sure, officially Google has taken a step back and has pledged to provide a way for developers and power-users to bypass those restrictions. But we can all expect it to be a cumbersome and change-prone process filled with ridiculous amounts of frictions at every step - and I wouldn’t even expect such a morally bankrupt company to keep maintaining this “sideloading” option.

Google once competed with Apple for customers. But in a world where Google walks away from the biggest antitrust trial since 1998 with yet another slap on the wrist, competition is dead, and Google is taking notes from Apple about what they can legally get away with. And the EU, the biggest opposer of its anti-competitive acts, is also becoming softer with Big Tech - both because Vestager has left the job, and because being soft with trillion-dollar monopolist tech titans is seen as a sign of being “technologically competitive”.

Your best bet is to purchase a Pixel 9a now, before more manufacturers decide to block bootloaders, and immediately flash it with #GrapheneOS.

The long term plan would instead be to throw all of our efforts and energies on Linux phones. The folks at GrapheneOS are doing an amazing job and fighting against all kind of pressures, but at some point we should probably all just acknowledge that anything that is tainted with Android, or runs on a device intended only to run Android, is a liability, and we should no longer build solutions on top of hardware and software that we can no longer trust.

Sailfish, PostmarketOS, UBPorts, MeeGo or whatever comes next must succeed. No matter the cost.

If you have a Google Workspace account, you could test to see if the rule in place for you by trying to send a message to your personal email address with a gender-related phrase or word you want to test to see if it's blocked to find out more detail what would be blocked and allowed by the rule.

#google #privacy #uspol

Google does not disclose exactly how their rule matches that warns users about emails that mention gender identity, but the content that triggered it was a sentence similar to this:

"We’ve also removed gender preference as a default field in an effort to reduce the amount of information we’re requesting."

Admins have options to change the default from Warn to Block or Allow.

#google #privacy #uspol

I'm a Google Workspace admin, and a team member sent me a screenshot showing that a message they wanted to send was being blocked because it violated an organizational policy-- which was news to me-- I hadn't put in place to block messages based on their content.

Turns out Google Workspace now warns by default when the message content mentions gender identity.

#google #privacy #politics

Alt...

Screenshot of Google Workspace content rules, Gender Identity among them.

Another #HowTo, this time how to use #Signal on #Android without giving it broad media permissions.

Signal does not use the 2 possible secure methods of accessint photos that Android offers, and clones #Whatsapp in that regard.

By insisting on needing access to read all your images, while being a complex app connected to the internet, and the only official versions containing proprietary #Google #blobs.

Links:
- https://community.signalusers.org/t/46828
- https://community.signalusers.org/t/55725

Other messengers like #SimpleX, #Element, #ElementX, #Fluffychat, #Conversations, #Threema and more save themselves the effort and just use the builtin options, improving security by design and unnecessary code bloat.

So, how can I use Signal without trusting it with all my images?

1. Use the "Share" Portal.

That is the obvious one, and a very nice feature on Android. It allows to share any media to an application and giving it access to only that.

This also works across the #WorkProfile or #PrivateSpace and can be used by Apps like #SaveTo to transfer files.

The workflow is often slower than just using the media chooser portal, but it works. It is what I use since years.

2. Android hacks

But this is not all. Setting a profile picture or group profile picture does not work through the share portal. So we use a Feature specific to Androids Sandbox:

- All apps can save files to various default directories like Pictures, Movies, Music, Downloads, Documents; without having read access to it.
- And all apps can access files they themself saved there.

Combining these two features, you can send a picture to Signal and use the "Save locally" button to save it from within the app.

The result is that this picture will be visible in Signals internal gallery and can be selected for profile and group pictures.

Obvious downsides are
- it is a stupid workflow
- it duplicates images that you need to delete manually afterwards
- pictures might be compressed twice, losing quality

But for this very limited purpose, it is kinda fine.

Still, @signalapp please solve this very old issue!

"Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea."

https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horrible-no-good-idea/

#tech #technology #BigTech #space #satellites #data #server #computing #CloudComputing #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #LLM #LLMs #MachineLearning #GenAI #generativeAI #AISlop #Meta #Google #OpenAI #ChatGPT

All this AI fuzz is making me sick, especially if I compare it to actually game-changing new technology like, for example, JPEG XL.

The former is hyped so much but it’s a very dull and bloated concept, while the latter is a concrete, non-proprietary, and free standard.

Of course, AI is fuelled by billions and billions of vacuous investments, while JPEG XL not only flies under the radar, but its adoption was actively blocked by Google because it went against their corporate interest.

To be clear: technical innovation is not the solution, but it saddens me to see that what is truly valuable is overlooked because some vacuous torment nexus takes up all the energy, the time, and the funding.

#JPEG #JPEGXL #jxl #jpg #AI #technology #capitalism #Google #WebP

@jima

New numbers, but no new records 😢

49.16
49.16
48.74

https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

#google #ipv6 #statistics

Periodic reminder:
Your parents probably taught you from a young age not to take gifts from strangers, right?
So, why do you blindly accept now "free" services from companies online?

#amazon #google #meta #microsoft #foss

The only flavour of decentralisation there’s no room for at FOSDEM is the kind that won’t speak at a conference that allows itself to be sponsored by, and thereby whitewashes, a surveillance capitalist like Google that is complicit in Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.

https://progressive.international/wire/2025-08-26-un-calls-out-google-and-amazon-for-abetting-gaza-genocide/en

#FOSDEM #Google #israel #genocide #Gaza #Palestine #UN #BigTech #complicity #whitewashing #institutionalCorruption #PR #freeAsInGenocide https://mastodon.matrix.org/@matrix/115603969911396223

Alt...

Screenshot of FOSDEM sponsors: At the top is Google.

So my first thought was not unlike @emaytch's: if the forks “live or die” by FF, then if FF goes down so do the forks. PaleMoon being independent gives us some respite, as does @servo being under active development —in the hopes that it becomes truly viable BEFORE #Firefox goes down: and of course we do not know yet if they'll stick with #Google's decisions about what is and what is not allowed on the Web, or if it will have the spine (and resources) to support tech that Google rejects.

3/

Under this analysis, browsers like @Vivaldi are in a very precarious situation: on the one hand, #VivaldiBrowser is being developed under what is arguably a “web of documents” mindset, and in fact more in general as a “Swiss knife of the Internet”, similarly to classic #OperaBrowser (I've already written about this at length). On the other hand, its reliance on the #Google-controlled #Blink engine that is designed for the “web of apps” cripples it in its efforts:

11/

XScreenSaver for Android - Priacy Policy

https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/google.html

This truly falls under "malicious compliance." LOL.

#google #privacy #android

@alice What the hecky?!

I generally don't use AI enhance so I hadn't noticed this. It doesn't surprise me, but like it's a private image library. I wonder if it was always like this or only after Google started adding AI watermarks?

I have noticed that Google AI Q and A results fail around queer stuff too. Example

#Google #AI #PurityTest

Alt...

A screenshot of a Google maps location result with a list of suggested questions such as "Do they sell sausages?" The question "Are they queer friendly" results in "This question isn't supported yet"

"Under the radar, Google has added features that allow Gmail to access all private messages and attachments for training its AI models.

If you use Gmail, you need to be aware of an important change that’s quietly rolling out. Reportedly, Google has recently started automatically opting users in to allow Gmail to access all private messages and attachments for training its AI models. This means your emails could be analyzed to improve Google’s AI assistants, like Smart Compose or AI-generated replies. Unless you decide to take action.

The reason behind this is Google’s push to power new Gmail features with its Gemini AI, helping you write emails faster and manage your inbox more efficiently. To do that, Google is using real email content, including attachments, to train and refine its AI models. Some users are now reporting that these settings are switched on by default instead of asking for explicit opt-in.

Which means that if you don’t manually turn these setting off, your private messages may be used for AI training behind the scenes. Even though Google promises strong privacy measures like anonymization and data security during AI training, for anyone handling sensitive or confidential information, that may not feel reassuring."

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/11/gmail-is-reading-your-emails-and-attachments-to-train-its-ai-unless-you-turn-it-off

#AI #GenerativeAI #Google #Gmail #Gemini

🚨 BREAKING #Google just activated #Gemini on #Gmail - without asking you.

Turn it off now; here's how!
https://tuta.com/blog/how-to-disable-gemini-on-android

✊️ Fight AI & fight Google

You have to manually turn off Smart Features in the Setting menu in TWO locations.

Share so everyone is aware. ❤️

Alt...

“We’ve activated Gemini on Android, Gmail, Chrome, Photos, and Google apps” With a reply, "No Thanks! Learn how to disable Gemini on Android, Gmail, Chrome, Photos, & Google apps on the Tuta blog. "

Alt...

Turn off smart features in Gmail, Chat & Meet: Screenshot of the google settings you need to navigate to turn off smart features. Next to Smart features click the box to turn off smart features in Gmail, Chat and Meet. Click on Manage Workspace smart feature settings and toggle these setting off.

Gmail can read your emails and attachments to train its AI, unless you opt out

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/11/gmail-is-reading-your-emails-and-attachments-to-train-its-ai-unless-you-turn-it-off

Et moi, qui ne veut pas alimenter encore et encore #Google et encore moins son #IA, je fais comment ? Parce que si mon ou ma correspondant·e utilise Gmail, je n'ai qu'à croiser les doigts en espérant qu'iel ait fait le nécessaire pour refuser (ce qui n'est pas tout à fait ma définition d'un consentement actif et positif au passage)...

#IA #Gmail #Google

New.

Google Threat Intelligence Group: Beyond the Watering Hole: APT24's Pivot to Multi-Vector Attacks https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/apt24-pivot-to-multi-vector-attacks #Google #threatintel #threatintelligence #infosec #espionage

What do you think of using Google in your life?

I use a Google Pixel 7 Pro at the moment, but I use GrapheneOS instead of OEM, and I think it is the best Android line of phones I have used so far. Their bootloader is lockable after installing custom operating systems which is much better than all other offers at the moment. The build quality, battery and design of the phone is solid as well. This phone has a lot of merits going for it which other Android phones are not replicating for the sake of a false sense of "security" or profits. I will appreciate Google for giving me a great phone to install GrapheneOS on, alongside Android for being a secure base for an operating system.

I appreciate the Chromium browser more than other browsers in the market. While Google Chrome is junk regarding user privacy, as well as shoving AI in your face, Chromium itself is actually pretty solid. It is also the most secure option, offering a malloc() implementation better than Firefox's mozmalloc, although not as secure as hardened_malloc, by GrapheneOS. Firefox is also implementing AI features into their browser, which leaves a bad taste in my mouth. MV2 is deprecated, sure, but you win more than you lose in security, as a lot of API features were exploitable. Chromium does a lot of good things, while Chrome gives the base itself a lot of bad blood. I would like to see what Servo can do, but I appreciate Google for making a secure browser.

I generally despise a lot of what Google offers, however. I feel like they lean heavily on the deception of convenience, where Google gives really good results while it uses your data for the sake of advertising. This applies with the Google Suite (Mail, Office, and Drive among others) as well. I would much rather use FOSS or nonprofit alternatives, such as Tutanota, or LibreOffice. Google is essentially the serpent from The Book of Genesis, selling you the benefit of their convenience for the sake of having your data stolen for their use. As such, I will choose not to follow Google convenience promise for my security.

Feel free to leave your opinions, and why I should consider other avenues rather than accepting a bit of Google in my life. As much as I love privacy, your privacy can't be guaranteed if there is no good security. Google may be known for piss-poor privacy, but their open source projects have a lot of security merits as well as good privacy. Do not use this as advice, but make your own conclusion.

#google #privacy #security #grapheneos #chromium #technology #FOSS

Will this sort of SNAFU put the brakes on the use of AI?

I appreciate that many just don’t see the dangers of AI and LLMs in everyday use, but a concrete example of defamation and potentially dangerous defamation as well might concentrate minds. Or will this just be a ‘business expense’ for Google?

http://archive.today/2025.11.18-182701/https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/ai-bot-summary-lawsuit-suing-google-black-bird-m3xl2bhsk

#AI #Google #Defamation

Alt...

From the linked article. A photograph of James Keene with the text AI accused me of killing three women. Now I’m suing Google An AI-generated summary allegedly claimed James Keene was serving life without parole. He is part of a growing group saying they’ve been defamed In the redemption story that became his calling card, a convicted drug dealer named James Keene agreed to work for the FBI as an undercover informant in a psychiatric jail, tasked with befriending a suspected serial killer named Larry Hall. Keene was credited with gathering crucial evidence that ensured Hall was denied parole. In return Keene was released early from prison and his story was eventually told in several books and the Apple TV miniseries Black Bird.

Checking out the new #Google #Antigravity IDE to keep up with the times. Not only does this setting seem a little cursed, but of all the things you'd want to run inside a container, it's unfortunate that this isn't shipped as a flatpak.

#Linux #programming #Gemini

Alt...

TERMINAL Terminal Command Auto Execution + Off - Never auto-execute terminal commands (except those in the Allow ist) + Auto - Agent decides whether to auto-execute any given terminal command « Turbo - Always auto-execute terminal commands (except those in the Deny — list) Note: a change to this setting will only apply to new messages sent to Agent. In-progress responses will use the previous setting value.

It looks like #Google hasn’t been completely deaf to the backlash against their proposed #Android app verification process.

While still being firmly convinced that installing an APK outside of the Play Store from a developer that doesn’t have a registered account on the Play Store shouldn’t be allowed in the general case (I refuse to call it “sideloading” because I’ve been compiling software on my machines for more than two decades and nobody has ever called it “sideloading”), it’s going to at least provide a “power user” solution to override that default.

Whether it’s an adb command, a hidden entry in the developer settings, an extra layer to flash on top of the OS, 10 confirmation popups or whatever extra friction they decide to come up with, is still open for debate.

I wouldn’t call it a win because whatever change adds new friction to the process of installing whatever software I want on the hardware I purchased is a loss.

But at least it’s something that power users are most likely to deal with - provided that they don’t further change the process down the road or gradually try to pull the rug under our feet.

Students and junior Android developers can then hopefully simply be instructed to the new process so they can still build apps for educational purposes without having to register Google accounts.

Anyway, this has still been a wake up call for me. We can’t keep relying on a company in such a terminal state of enshittification for our primary mobile devices. Primary-driver Linux phones are needed now .

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/11/android-developer-verification-early.html?m=1

All mentions of "AI" should be changed into "Brain Rot Inducer"…

"Do you want the Brain Rot Inducer to summarize this text for you?"

"The Brain Rot Inducer can auto-answer this e-mail for you!"

"Let the Brain Rot Inducer write this social media post for you!"

"Easily generate an image with the Brain Rot Inducer, and call it your own creation!"

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #LLM #LLMs #MachineLearning #tech #technology #BigTech #GenAI #generativeAI #AISlop #Meta #Google #OpenAI #ChatGPT

Here is this week's #Linux and #OpenSource new video!

In this one, we have efforts to fix Hybrid / Dual GPU support on Linux, we have #Google walking back their #Android sideloading policy, and of course, Valve's big push for Linux gaming:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB9z2HEldNw

So that's both #Toolstation and #Google responding to me that they're totally happy with leading their users to scam artists this week.

Toolstation's scam is a "partnership" and google apparently had a whole team review the naked and blatent scam and couldn't find anything wrong with it!

I'm really quite ok with the idea of capitalism, but it's now reaching far into "we'll scam anyone we can and we don't care", i'm not so sure.

@distrowatch

What is disturbing to me is that the term side loading has been invented to make users think that they are not allowed to install any program on their computers other than those sanctioned by some company.

People are also made to believe that their phones are special devices while in fact they are simply very powerful small single board computers.

Instead of getting angry or frustrated the Open Source Community should band together so that full-blown Linux based Operating Systems can be made available for the masses, be installed as easy as standard Linux distributions on X86 and on SBCs is like the Raspberry Pi ARM family, so that they can remove the bloatware which Google dictates and then install any Linux flavor designed for their Android computers

#Android #Google #Alphabet #programming #technology #sideloading #installation #Linux #distribution #OpenSource #POSIX

I'm currently in progress of migrating the rest of my #Google data into #Nextcloud ahead of mass deleting it on the Google side. No particular reason other than it's long overdue and I don't want to pay for Google One.

#FFmpeg to #Google: Fund Us or Stop Sending Bugs
A lively discussion about open source, security, and who pays the bills has erupted on Twitter.

https://thenewstack.io/ffmpeg-to-google-fund-us-or-stop-sending-bugs/

Alternative geography: "Borderline ambiguity: How Google Maps removes disputed Western Sahara border for Morocco users" - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/12/google-maps-border-western-sahara-morocco
#google #maps #morocco

Happier news from #Google, of all places, next, with initial patches designed to get mainline #Linux up and running on the Pixel 10 family of smartphones. Yeah, I was surprised too.

https://www.hackster.io/news/google-releases-early-patches-for-running-mainline-linux-on-its-pixel-10-smartphone-family-124cd3210699

#Smartphone #Software #Android #OperatingSystem #News #Hackster

Imagine being one of the most valuable companies on earth, making billions thanks to open-source software like #ffmpeg, without contributing financially to it, without contributing to its codebase, and even expecting those unpaid volunteers to fix bugs for you in a timely fashion as if they were your own employees.

Imagine contributing to a huge piece of software like ffmpeg that works behind the scenes on literally any device that can either play, record or transform media, a project that has become a critical piece of our digital infrastructure, and doing so unpaid, uncredited and stressed out by companies that make billions thanks to your work.

This is the current state of open-source today.

A bunch of burned out, unpaid and uncredited volunteers building free stuff in their spare time that trillion-dollar freeriders feel entitled to use without contributing back.

ffmpeg developers are right. Either #Google contributes back, or they won’t even look at their bugs anymore.

And, in an ideal world where free software licenses weren’t written by good Samaritans, either trillion-dollar companies contribute back, or they shouldn’t be allowed to use free software for profit.

20 years ago I used to have discussions with fellow engineers whether open-source would have won over commercial software.

Now I can firmly say that open-source won. There’s no doubt about it. Linux, Apache products, Python, ffmpeg, curl etc. power all of today’s technological stack. But it’s not the win that I expected. It’s the kind of win that happened because corporations realized that open-source is just a way for them to cut on internal engineering costs.

https://thenewstack.io/ffmpeg-to-google-fund-us-or-stop-sending-bugs/

And at another domain of ours (lucire.com). #Google #AI

Alt...

A list of 25 Google bot attempts to access lucire.com, met with Cloudflare challenges.

Blocking a ton of bots from crooked #Google. Blimmin’ thieves. #AI

Alt...

A list of 24 Google bots trying to get into Autocade (and one Tencent bot).