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.
walkingthisquai6 days ago
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."
simonw6 days ago
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.
afro886 days ago
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.
walkingthisquai6 days ago
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.
gapan6 days ago
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?
simonw6 days ago
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.
reciprocity6 days ago
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.
rotis6 days ago
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.
SirFatty6 days ago
Why not assume yes?
hofo6 days ago
lol any answer to “do we use your data” that isn’t “no” is a yes
wodenokoto6 days ago
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.
freakynit6 days ago
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.
rkagerer6 days ago
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.
rollcat6 days ago
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.
freakynit6 days ago
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.
jon-wood6 days ago
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.
johannes12343216 days ago
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.
2muchcoffeeman6 days ago
There’s plenty of services that they could have gone into and charged money for.
lwhi6 days ago
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?
jsnell6 days ago
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.
lwhi6 days ago
A good point, but I still think they're struggling to innovate.
Their advertising revenue is over $71B/quarter.
As far as I know the majority of the non advertising revenue is from Google Cloud and subscriptions for services.
Most of the interesting product initiatives they've launched (that I can think of) have folded.
kmod6 days ago
They are definitely capable of writing such statements, which you can see in their enterprise products. In my Google Workspace gemini app it says pretty prominently and clearly:
Your [ORGNAME] chats aren’t used to improve our models
So they definitely understand that people want to hear that their data isn't being used for training, and they know how to say it clearly and reassuringly. Which makes the omission of that in their consumer products more telling in my view.
doctorpangloss6 days ago
Haha, but do they paraphrase your chats, and use it for training? (Ye$)
noduerme6 days ago
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?
zmmmmm6 days ago
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.
j_timberlake6 days ago
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.
tgv6 days ago
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.
rollcat6 days ago
It's a test run. They will relax those conditions first chance they get.
acters6 days ago
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.
IX-1036 days ago
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.
sieep6 days ago
firefox + DDG + linux + vpn is my preferred combo, or the 'privacy stack' as I like to call it.
troyvit6 days ago
Thank you, thank you Wayland for being you.
xnx6 days ago
> * Use a Mac or Windows computer
I wonder if Chromebooks fall under Linux
jkaplowitz6 days ago
They definitely don’t fall under Mac or Windows, at least.
rkagerer6 days ago
Could you please add:
* Opted in
(Or at least, "* Hasn't opted out")
FL4106 days ago
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.
holoduke6 days ago
Or course they are using it. With Google even this keyboard stroke on Android is used for something.
mig16 days ago
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.
repeekad6 days ago
Also ex, for a reason, everyone with ethics left, and Google “is a conventional company” now
Didn't Google release many data collection features as an "opt-out" setting (ie: without user consent)?
troupo6 days ago
> 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.
You can always opt out of using gboard altogether.
FUTO Keyboard is quite nice.
interloxia6 days ago
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.
kelvinjps6 days ago
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.
48terry6 days ago
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?
SquareWheel6 days ago
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.
rpdillon6 days ago
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.
lwhi6 days ago
Misinformation isn't more or less appropriate depending on the target.
redml6 days ago
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.
jacooper5 days ago
They do, even when you pay for gemini pro/ultra.
blauditore6 days ago
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.
kirito13376 days ago
they obvuscate it with legal nonsense
paxys7 days ago
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.
qnleigh7 days ago
> 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.
paxys7 days ago
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.
IX-1036 days ago
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.
rhetocj236 days ago
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.
troyvit6 days ago
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?
rhetocj236 days ago
Ive come to realise the constraint on innovation et al is not external resources - its what comes from within. Imagination.
thwarted7 days ago
We're too lazy to browse now, that we need machines to do it?
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.
troyvit6 days ago
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.
mock-possum6 days ago
I don’t think that website actually wants you to be here, it looks like it’s trying to get you to leave.
typpilol6 days ago
You need an ad blocker badly lol
riffraff6 days ago
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.
baq6 days ago
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.
ehnto6 days ago
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.
garyfirestorm6 days ago
It’s not browsing we are lazy at. It’s parsing through ton of results until we find what we were looking for.
blharr6 days ago
>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?
iansinnott6 days ago
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.
weatherlite6 days ago
> 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.
atdt7 days ago
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.
nomilk7 days ago
I think it will be useful as a modernised ctrl+f
firefoxd7 days ago
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.
thwarted7 days ago
An infinite number of people at an infinite number of computers will eventually be served the content they desire.
OtherShrezzing6 days ago
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.
ascorbic6 days ago
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.
macNchz6 days ago
Recording videos to send to our AI Tamagotchis so they don’t start complaining that they’re bored.
typpilol6 days ago
Lmao. No wonder Google fixed their bot views recently on YouTube. We're coming to this.
therein6 days ago
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".
5423542342356 days ago
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.
esperent7 days ago
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.
mikae16 days ago
> 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.
xnx6 days ago
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.
sandspar6 days ago
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.
lxgr6 days ago
That's arguably not browsing the web, that's watching TV.
Nothing wrong with that, in theory and in moderation.
_el1s76 days ago
No, that doesn't make any sense, because the web is not a social media.
siva76 days ago
For most humans, it is.
isodev6 days ago
That’s the future if we leave it to the tech bros. As humans we can and should do better though.
woodrowbarlow6 days ago
i legitimately miss stumbleupon.
verytrivial6 days ago
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.
xandrius6 days ago
Left when they disabled uBlock Origin.
I was 60% Chrome and 40% Firefox, now I'm 99% Firefox and 1% Chromium.
nicce6 days ago
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.
freedomben6 days ago
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
NaomiLehman6 days ago
you don't need to be logged in atm, AFAIK
dns_snek6 days ago
I believe they're talking about the mechanism where logging into Chrome automatically signs you into many of Google's services across the web.
worldsavior6 days ago
What's wrong with that? That's the purpose of logging into chrome.
mort966 days ago
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.
verytrivial6 days ago
The problem for me is the fusing of the browser with a preferred 'platform' of services. I don't want a partisan browser.
dns_snek5 days ago
The purpose of logging into a browser has always been to synchronize bookmarks, settings, and extensions.
hooverd6 days ago
Chrome is a browser, not your Google account?
mosselman6 days ago
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
Yoric6 days ago
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.
simonw6 days ago
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.
lxgr6 days ago
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/
yunohn6 days ago
> 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.
moolcool6 days ago
> It doesn’t browse for you
I would hope not
zamadatix7 days ago
Similar threads today, sorted by number of comments:
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.
onehair7 days ago
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
t_mann6 days ago
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.
dodos6 days ago
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)
navigate83106 days ago
It's just a simple one-time tweak under settings to halt clearing cookies upon browser restart.
drnick16 days ago
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.
aucisson_masque6 days ago
It’s a hassle for 99% of the population, even with a password manager.
antipaul7 days ago
The danger with google is that they suck at user experience
beebmam7 days ago
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
dundundundun7 days ago
If they do close an account they have a support line you can call and talk to a human.
tjohns7 days ago
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.
SXX6 days ago
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.
pram7 days ago
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.
ghm21996 days ago
Wait, how does this footgun work?
smittywerben6 days ago
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."
TheDong7 days ago
[flagged]
geor9e7 days ago
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.
If the forced deprecation of Ublock wasn't enough to get me off Chrome, this sure as hell is.
daft_pink6 days ago
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.
nicce6 days ago
They just introduced endless nagging in AI Studio to enable Drive integration, if you disallowed it. They really want your data!
0x6c6f6c5 days ago
If your data is already in Drive haven't you already given them it?
nicce5 days ago
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.
bambax6 days ago
> 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.
wiether6 days ago
Ils avaient probablement dépassé leur quota de tokens pour faire traduire la page par Gemini...
be_erik7 days ago
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.
skybrian7 days ago
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?
resonious7 days ago
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!"
nextworddev7 days ago
It’s for Google to gain complete control of the context whereever you are on the Internet
jama2117 days ago
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.
nextworddev7 days ago
Ok dude
mFixman6 days ago
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.
bearjaws6 days ago
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.
ghssds6 days ago
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?
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.
albert_e7 days ago
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.
aucisson_masque6 days ago
Use macOS or Linux, don’t use chrome. The are getting tinier everyday.
wunderwuzzi236 days ago
Much longer actually, Bing Chat in Edge came out more than 2+ years ago.
The28thDuck7 days 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.
alex_suzuki6 days ago
Count me in! Do you have one of those fancy things called „hubs“ or „switches“ or are we going BNC with terminators?
dwd7 days ago
I have a D25 Laplink Cable somewhere and maybe even a copy of Netware 4.
vehemenz6 days ago
Yep. Real "metaverse" energy.
cwmoore7 days ago
What is LAN?
easeout6 days ago
Baby don't hurt me
blooalien7 days ago
> What is LAN?
I think it's like the opposite of WAN? :shrug:
imiric6 days ago
> 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.
nomilk7 days ago
I tried it on this page and says 'I don't have access' [0].
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).
nomilk7 days ago
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.
nomilk7 days ago
> 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.
zamadatix6 days ago
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.
nomilk7 days ago
I asked Gemini and it may says you need a US based Google 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?
eclipxe7 days ago
Stealing clicks? What obligation does Google have to send traffic to a site?
Razengan7 days ago
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.
maz1b7 days ago
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.
mind_orbit6 days ago
What does this mean for publishers and SEO, if AI starts answering questions directly in Chrome instead of sending traffic?
deanmoriarty7 days ago
What do you think this will mean for OpenAI, Anthropic and their current valuations?
ocdtrekkie7 days ago
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.
Workaccount27 days ago
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
vehemenz6 days ago
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.
ocdtrekkie7 days ago
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.
Workaccount26 days ago
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.
muppetman7 days ago
How do you turn it off?
weikju7 days ago
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.
zamadatix7 days ago
chrome://settings/ai
SilverElfin7 days ago
Google taking advantage of their anti competitive monopolies
rvz7 days ago
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.
SpaceL10n6 days ago
Does anyone know if they are embedding Gemini in chromium and will it eventually be available in nwjs?
zamadatix6 days ago
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.
croemer6 days ago
> 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
deviation6 days ago
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.
captainepoch6 days ago
I hope Brave deletes this from Chromium if it's present in the source code.
yreg6 days ago
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.
badlogic6 days ago
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.
657 days ago
Who wants to bet that Chrome makes this feature impossible to disable?
elpakal7 days ago
I’ll take that bet. You will be able to disable it but that won’t mean they won’t still run it.
onion2k6 days ago
I'll take that bet too. You will always be able to disable it by not using Chrome.
amlib6 days ago
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.
m3kw96 days ago
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.
lionkor6 days ago
"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.
gloosx6 days ago
Obvious mousetrap. Imagine shovelling all this stuff at users for "free". I'm switching to my own Chrominium builds...
atonse7 days ago
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.
vachina7 days ago
Google had to do this. They cannot die standing watching ChatGPT et. al. eating their ad-free lunch.
onion2k7 days ago
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.
ukuina6 days ago
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.
iansinnott6 days ago
Hopefully this will not affect other browser that are downstream of Chromium.
EZ-E7 days ago
We need a [US Only] tag on the thread title, I almost got excited
SirMaster6 days ago
How do we get it out?
hankman866 days ago
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.
lxgr6 days ago
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.
gyosko6 days ago
Damn, the future is more and more distopic every day.
reenorap7 days ago
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.
prakhar8976 days ago
wondering if we can use it with playwright/puppeteer. would be a godsend for scrapers if they can identify useful data.
mmastrac7 days ago
Given the current err climate of thought purity, doesn't this seem a little too risky of a product to enable?
Poomba7 days ago
I feel like we are past that point now. The fact that AI will get things wrong has been normalized already
mmaunder7 days ago
Ok Google employees, please quit the vote brigading.
admiralrohan6 days ago
Inevitable.
cynicalsecurity6 days ago
Another reason to ditch Chrome. It's becoming an even more horrible bloatware.
chartered_stack6 days ago
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.
bertili7 days ago
EU: Open goal and no keeper in sight. Just a small tab. Please.
Michael_Keller6 days ago
[dead]
keyle7 days ago
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
citizenfishy6 days ago
Gilfoyle will sort that
blooalien7 days ago
> 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.
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
lihaciudanieljr6 days ago
[dead]
tzury6 days ago
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.
firefox + DDG + linux + vpn is my preferred combo, or the 'privacy stack' as I like to call it.
Thank you, thank you Wayland for being you.
> * 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.
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.
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.
They do, even when you pay for gemini pro/ultra.
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 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.
don't worry -- they have big plans!
https://research.google/blog/mechanism-design-for-large-lang...
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 think it will be useful as a modernised ctrl+f
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
"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.
We need a [US Only] tag on the thread title, I almost got excited
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.
Damn, the future is more and more distopic every day.
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.
wondering if we can use it with playwright/puppeteer. would be a godsend for scrapers if they can identify useful data.
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
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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.