Google can now read your WhatsApp messages

The line is blurry. Google is positioning Gemini not just as an app, but as a OS level feature. The OS can by definition reach into any third-app app to do anything it wants. I'll give some more examples of OS-level features in case it's not clear: copy/paste is an OS-level feature and it is designed to extract arbitrary text or content from third party apps (copy) and insert them into third party apps (paste); screenshotting is an OS-level feature and it is designed to capture the visible views of any third party app with the only exception being DRM content.

Apple Intelligence has similar marketing. In last year's WWDC, there was the whole "Siri, when is my mom's flight landing?" segment (see https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2024/101/ at 1h22m) that didn't generate any controversy. So for some reason people think Siri should rightfully be an OS-level feature but Gemini should not. Got it. I guess Apple's PR is just that much better than Google's.

Unfortunately the situation on Android is that other apps cannot do anything with WhatsApp, and there's fuck all you can do about it as a user.

I shouldn't need Google special-casing Gemini to allow LLMs to interact with my messages. I should be able to wire up Tasker to WhatsApp on one end, and to OpenAI or Anthropic models of my choice via API calls on the other end. Alas, Android is basically like iPhone now, just with more faux choice of vendors and less quality control.

> Google needs to not be abusing its position as the source of the OS to give its software special privilege to reach inside of third-party apps.

There are some extremely useful features that you can implement with AI, but currently only at the OS level, not with normal app permissions-- namely live translation of audio streams that belong to another app (calls, video playback, etc.).

But I suppose you're still right; it would still be better if Android had an API for sharing app audio streams like this.

I'd be more interested to know what would happen to Google if it turned out they were reading all of our WhatsApp messages.

If that's a slap on the wrist, then we can be sure that Google is doing it.

Siri does this, but the processing happens on-device so it stays private. Seems like a nice compromise.

Google has Gemma? So they could also blow Apple out of the water by competing directly there.

> Google needs to not be abusing its position as the source of the OS to give its software special privilege to reach inside of third-party apps

Gemini uses the same APIs and permissions as any other Android app.

Precisely. Its incredible that people think Apple is playing 4D chess with AI, when in reality the simplest answer is the most plausible - Apple has no clue wth to do with AI. Their own assistant - Siri - has been in shambles for close to a decade.

Structurally Apple is in a disadvantage, in the AI race. And no amount of waiting, or polish is going to help them - unless they partner with OpenAI, Anthropic or Google.

I for one am glad they did this for the humor alone.

> You really meant to send that I love you to Louis coworker, right? Not to "Love"? Too late

Why make up stuff like this? Siri confirms everything that sends data.

I’ve not read this; do you have any links?

I know right?

They have always been behind. Why would this time be any different?

Steve Jobs predicted LLMs in 1985. He was 40 years ahead of everyone else.

(Search: Steve Jobs predicted the future of AI)

Why wonder? We can use AI to generate what he might have said! /s

> Do you really think you're going to send 1,000,000 nudes to your wife without accidentally sending one to the wrong person!?

That seems like the wrong way to spin this hypothetical probability.

A quick search says there are 1.38B iPhone users worldwide. According to[0], 87.8% of 18+ year olds have sexted, so let's estimate that to mean 1.21B users. Even if we assume users only ever send one nude, that means 1,210 gaffes if you assume one in a million.

[0] https://www.womens-health.com/sexting-statistics

It's the other way around. The probability is so low that it is incredibly unlikely to happen to any given individual. You would have to be paranoid to worry about it. On the other hand the probability is so high that, when considering the size of Apple's user base, such incidents would happen regularly.

There's a "sensational news story" multiplier.

That was a blessing in disguise though. Its way easier for me to not binge youtube now

Wouldn't a blank homepage be exactly what you expect if you had no tracking enabled? The algorithm that generates the homepage is probably totally stunted with only empty logs to draw on.

That's a gift, the opposite of a punishment.

It's not a punishment; it's entirely transactional. You make yourself less valuable to advertisers so you also make yourself less valuable to Google. Therefore Google provides you with fewer features such as a blank homepage.

The era of Google providing costly features to users with no benefit to itself is coming to an end.

Thanks for the suggestion! I actually see that Business Standard Google Workspace (for 1 user) that includes Gemini Access costs less than Gemini Pro subscription for an individual. I will give it a go.

Are those the only options?

How about paying once, owning a specific version and that's it?

As we have all learned, ad and subscription models aren't mutually exclusive. You can still get ads while paying for a subscription.

In fact, I don't believe the ad model would have gone away if everyone started paying for a subscription. The bottom tier would still be filled with ads.

Ideally, the market would solve this. The companies that are pushing annoying would lose customers to the companies that don't. But since we don't live in a ideal world, I honestly think regulations would be the only way. Something like "If a customer pays for subscription in any way, you can't show ads" - and then let the companies put a realistic price to their subscription tiers, which makes it worthwhile for them.

> Because people collectively vote for the ad model over the subscription model

You make it sound as if those were the only two options available..

I pay for 2 streaming services. They include annoying ads and the only way to avoid ads is, yeah to just pay more. No sense at all.

As smart TVs, cable TV and streaming services show, even things that people generally pay for will get the ad model given enough time.

It's totally possible to have the ad model without all the spying. It's just that marketers don't want that to be an option. They're all in on spying on us.

Were we even given a choice? In most cases, no.

people didn't vote for shit, if they could vote they'd vote for no ads and no cost. companies like google destroyed this option on purpose. there is no reason why the vast majority of apps and services online can't be both free and ad free. if i look for tetris on the app store it's literally impossible to find a version that's both ad free and free of purchases despite the fact that i know there's at minimum 100 options that fit this criteria. google/apple just buries them and deliberately doesnt allow filtering to find them

You can pay for Google services. But even if you pay for Google One or YouTube premium, I'm sure that Google will still track your behavior and mine your data. Why would a company not "double-dip"?

This is a dumb take. They will make money every way they can.

We are paying for phones but we are still the product. Google Facebook etc were explicitly created to monetize privacy. What I search for is monetized. Who I know is monetized. Private companies will monetize what we perceive as public goods to our detriment.

Most paid streaming services now started showing ads because they are looking for more revenue and profit.

RTFA.

Don't act like your opinion is the only one that matters. You may not, but other people do care about their privacy.

"Here's the thing: Google promises that under normal circumstances, Gemini cannot read or summarize your WhatsApp messages. But, and this is a big but, with the "help" of the Google Assistant or the Utilities app, it may view your messages (including images), read and respond to your WhatsApp notifications, and more."

Doesn't matter what your opinion is on privacy, google doesn't give you the option to opt out. - "regardless of whether your Gemini Apps Activity is on or off."

One problem with this sort of thing is that—sure, we can call privacy violation an opinion and admit that some people have dumb opinions like “I don’t need any privacy.” But unfortunately only one person needs to let the privacy violation bot into the conversation to violate everybody’s privacy, so it isn’t as if your opinion will really be respected.

Of course, the easy solution is that nobody has conversations that might need privacy anymore; people can just always be in public persona mode. Hopefully we don’t end up with a society made up of inauthentic lonely people as a result.

I think if I understand the article correctly it sounds like Google might also be reading the messages so it can respond for you. Regardless I think the other thing people might not be happy about is Gemini can still interact with apps regardless of if you have app activity turned on or off, as quoted from the linked email in the article: What's changing Gemini will soon be able to help you use Phone, Messages, WhatsApp, and Utilities on your phone, whether your Gemini Apps Activity is on or off

Why do I keep getting ads for stuff I can't afford then?

I wonder how much of this is actual advertising working (proven by independent A/B testing) and how much of it is big tech bullshitting their shareholders and customers. Even Veritasium had a video ~10 years ago, describing Facebook's way of reducing view counts to coerce advertisers to pay higher.

Buying junk is so yesterday. Today the game is to feed you conspiracies and farm political support.

Agreed the privacy that keeping AI "in a corner" appeals to me too.

The fundamental catch here is that 80%+ of the future benefit will likely come from the very thing that erodes privacy: deep integration and context. Imagine if a Gemini had your entire life in its context (haha scary I know!), prompting would be so much more powerful.

That's the core, uncomfortable trade-off we're all facing now.

It's going the opposite direction. AI won't be inside each different thing, instead everything else will be nested under the AI. Like Gemini here. AI will have user-equivalent access to interact with any app. It will be the default and people will not mind it because it's convenient and if you have nothing to hide.

Google also has AI models optimized to run on phones, they're just in a lot better of a position to actually build purpose-built LLMs for phones.

It's not clear to me why certain classes of things still end up farmed out to the cloud (such as this, or is it?). Maybe their LLM hasn't been built in a very pluggable fashion.

> they have recently decided to move away from that idea and use OpenAI.

... although, to be fair, they're negotiating with OpenAI to run the models in "secure enclaves", which should, assuming everything works right which is a huge assumption, keep Apple or anybody else from reaching inside and seeing what the model is "thinking about".

Assistant stuff. Like you bark "order a pepperoni pizza from Joe's Pizza" and it happens. You take a pic of your fridge and say "order stuff to stock it up to my usual levels". Or book a flight, or buy concert tickets or clothes, or get media recommendations, replan a trip while driving if you change your mind and add a stop somewhere. Ask to summarize group chat message floods. Put on some music. Control smart home gadgets.

It's hard to predict exactly though. I remember thinking in 2001 that nobody except the busiest businessmen would need a cell phone. A landline at home is perfectly enough and in special cases there are phone booths. And in 2011 I thought the same about smartphones. Why would I need email while walking in the street? Can't it wait until I'm home at the desktop? If I need computer stuff on the go, I can take a laptop. Similarly, I'm not quite sure how exactly it will go but probably in 10 years you'll need to have an AI agent to function in society. The legacy infrastructure decays if nobody uses it even if you'd prefer not to jump on the bandwagon. Today you often MUST have an app downloaded to do things, e.g. some museums require it, sometimes government services are much more tedious otherwise. Some restaurants only have a QR code and no physical menu. Often news items (from school, or local municipality) are only shared in social media. Etc. etc. I can easily imagine that there will be things you can't manually do in 2035, only by asking your AI agent to do it for you. And it will scan all your data to make sure that what you're doing is impeccable in intent and safety and permissibility (like an inverse captcha: you must be Gemini or another approved bot to do the action. As a human you have to jump a million hoops that maybe takes days of providing various details etc. And Gemini will be easy to spook and will be opinionated about whether you should really get to do that action or not.). And it will communicate behind your back with the AI of the other party to decide everything. Or who knows what. But it will be necessary to use.