In 2024, Apple made a gesture of goodwill to European regulators and opened iOS 18 to RCS, the evolution of the old SMS. Great, but too late.
RCS, which stands for Rich Communication Services, is SMS via the internet with all the benefits that come with this improvement, such as support for high-quality images, read receipts, typing indicators, and audio messages.
In other words, it is the “WhatsApp version” of SMS.
The new version of Nova Launcher, a popular launcher for Android, brought an unwanted new feature: advertising trackers from Meta and Google. On Exodus, a non-profit app auditing platform, you can see the changes from the previous version (8.1.6) to the new one (8.2.4).
Nova Launcher was purchased by Sweden's Instabridge a few months after the launcher's creator left Branch, the company that bought the app in 2022 and promised to open its code — which never happened. Instabridge has confirmed that it is testing ads in Nova Launcher and that it will not display ads to those who have Nova Prime (paid version).
Once again, Google threatens the 3 billion (!) Gmail users with Gemini (AI) features. This time, the change is dramatic: the inbox will be “smart”, which would be tempting if AI models were capable of summarizing correctly (they are not) and were not prone to mistakes (“hallucination” is an euphemism for mistakes). For now, the new Gmail is being released to Americans who pay for Google's expensive AI plans. The prophylactic measure is to disable all AI features in Gmail: in the settings, General tab, uncheck the option Enable smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet. You're welcome!
A few months ago, youtubers reported unsolicited interventions by Google to “improve” their videos with generative AI. It appeared to be a test; now it’s official.
Channel owners can disable this feature in Studio: go to Settings, Channel, Advanced settings and uncheck the two options under Video quality enhancements. For viewers, Google’s suggested workaround is to change the resolution in the player’s settings.
In the same vein as the “phones that will stop running WhatsApp” beat, Brazilian news sites seem to have found a new evergreen click source for tech desks imported from Forbes’: millions of leaked Gmail passwords.
There is, in fact, a database of that type circulating online, created by an undergraduate student in the United States. Troy Hunt, who runs Have I Been Pwned, a breach repository, analyzed the data and found that “only” 8% of the passwords — about 14 million — are new. That makes sense, given the database was glued together by aggregating entries from multiple sources and prior breaches.
The main takeaway from a story like this isn’t “your Gmail password may have leaked,” but rather that “any of your passwords could leak at any time.” Not to spread alarm, but to encourage awareness of good digital security practices.
Which ones? For this situation, mostly these two:
You can check whether your passwords have leaked by entering your email at Have I Been Pwned. If it shows up, there’s no need to panic: change the password and enable a second authentication factor. Google explains how to do this for Gmail.
Google
via Android Developers Blog
Google
via Search Engine Roundtable
The US ruled the “remedies” to be applied to Google in the case where the company was found guilty of monopolistic practices in the search market:
And that’s it.
It wasn’t much and everyone complained. Well, almost everyone: Apple and Mozilla — which receive huge payments from Google to keep its search engine as the default in iOS/Safari and Firefox, respectively — are relieved.
It’s almost impossible to escape WhatsApp and very difficult to get rid of Instagram. For many, it’s also undesirable. Friends, relatives, loved ones, and the entire presence of many businesses are only available on one or the other (or both).
In 2022, when I wrote about a “more affectionate approach” to technology (pt_BR), I had recently returned to using these and other commercial platforms. I lowered my defenses in an attempt to be more present, to participate more.
The problem with companies like Meta is that every concession on our part is exploited to the fullest.
Google sent an email to Android phone owners warning that Gemini “will soon be able to help you use Phone, Messages, WhatsApp, and Utilities on your phone, whether your Gemini Apps Activity is on or off.” The change is scheduled for July 7th.
The notice generated confusion even in Android-focused publications. — 9to5Google, Android Police, Android Authority. Even after clarifications, including a statement from Google itself, the whole thing remains… confusing.
From what I understand, if Gemini Apps Activity is disabled, Gemini will continue to be available and have access to the mentioned apps, including WhatsApp and Phone. The difference is that interactions with the AI won’t be recorded in the history and will be stored by Google for up to 72 hours, with the guarantee that they won’t be used to train AIs or reviewed by humans.
(In other words, leaving history enabled subjects interactions to AI training and reviews by other humans.)
Those who *really* don’t want Gemini meddling with calls, messages, WhatsApp, and system settings need to disable integrations with each app within the Gemini app itself. Which seems to be another thing, different from Gemini Apps Activity. I presume it’s this app.
The aforementioned specialized publications, after updating their stories to “clear up the confusion,” concluded that the net result of the change is positive for people’s privacy. I’m not so sure about that. Confusions of this type, which sound intentional and try to hide the “nuclear” toggles (that disable the offered feature), tend to be defeats for privacy. And I won’t even get into the merits of whether Gemini snooping through my messages is good or bad.
Or maybe I still don’t understand it properly.
Related link (I think?): the extensive Gemini Apps privacy center.
Between Meta announcing that its AI, Meta AI, reached 1 billion users and Google saying that AI Overviews are used by 1.5 billion, I’m curious to know how many of these people intentionally use the feature, or prefer it to what the AI replaces.
AI Overviews appear at the top of searches, with no option to turn them off. Meta AI, I suspect many people trigger accidentally by tapping that horrible button in WhatsApp, in search results across its three core apps, or when trying to tag someone in a group by typing an @ symbol.
It’s very easy to reach enormous numbers when you already have a giant platform. I don’t think that’s even part of the discussion. The issue is trumpeting these numbers as if they were earned, rather than imposed.
In the lawsuit where the US Justice is deciding which “remedy” to give to Alphabet, following its conviction for monopolizing the search engine market, Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice-president of services, said that in April, the volume of searches made via Safari shrank for the first time in history — that is, in almost two decades.
Eddy attributes the decline to the rise of generative AI assistants that deliver pre-digested search results, such as Perplexity (with whom Apple is reportedly in talks), ChatGPT, and Claude.
Alphabet (Google) shares took a 7.5% dive following the Apple executive’s statement, as reported by Bloomberg. The company released a statement disputing the information, saying that “we continue to see overall query growth in Search. That includes an increase in total queries coming from Apple’s devices and platform”
Who to believe? I don’t know, but if there were doubts that a seismic shift is underway, data like this helps dispel them.
Eddy Cue also said that Apple is considering changing Safari so that the browser can incorporate AI assistants, and that he has lost sleep over the possibility of losing the annual USD 20 billion that Google pays as a “sweetener” to be Safari’s default search engine. I almost feel sorry for him.
Does your phone run Android? If so, you might have noticed a new app called SafetyCore. Announced by Google in October 2024, the company has been rolling it out recently (at least here, in Brazil).
SafetyCore is designed for devices running Android 9 or later, takes up about 2 GB of storage, and according to Google “provides common infrastructure that apps can use to protect users from unwanted content.” The documentation also notes that “the classification of content runs exclusively on your device and the results aren’t shared with Google.”
Almost no one reads these docs or even warnings, alerts of an app. What definitely catches your eye is a new icon among your apps that seems to appear overnight. Is SafetyCore something to worry about?
It’s published on the Play Store and, like any other app over there, it gets ratings and comments. Its average rating is 3.5, with the highest (5) receiving the most votes overall and the lowest (1) not being insignificant in number. One standout negative comment sums up the problem (in Portuguese, here translated):
“The app installed on its own and when I tried to open it, it just showed the app info. I’m not sure if it’s legitimate or not, and that worries me and many other consumers, breaking our trust in the security of the operating system. A quick question: if the app is legitimate, is it supposed to have an icon and do something, or is it supposed to be hidden? Like, for example, Google Play Services.”
If I had to sum the issue up even more, I’d say that the way SafetyCore was released is an example of a lack of transparency and a disregard for user autonomy. No matter how good Google’s intentions may be — which, judging by the history of big tech, is far from a guarantee — this isn’t the right approach.
Apple isn’t off the hook either. At the end of December 2024, someone noticed a new option in Apple Photos: “Enhanced Visual Search,” on by default. It identifies the location of photos even when there are no geo location in the metadata, by recognizing landmarks in the images. The documentation explains that it “works without sending your photos or videos to Apple and without Apple learning about the information in those photos or videos.”
In both cases, trust is lost when features like these are enabled quietly, without giving users the option to opt-out — a practice that remind what malicious parties would adopt if their intention were installing malware on millions, even billions, of devices.
What’s frustrating is that these are promising features that seem like good ideas. Scanning for unwanted or malicious content on your device without sending data to Google’s cloud? A real step forward, if true. Improving photo search without handing over your images to a big tech company? Sounds great.
However, note that both promises are extremely difficult to verify since all the code is closed source. That alone is a huge red flag. Enabling these features by default without any notice only worsens the situation.
Google will change the names of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America and revert Denali to Mount McKinley in its Maps app, aligning it with one of President Donald Trump’s weird ideas.
Someone dug up a 2008 post from Google’s public policy blog where the then-global director of the sector talks about this very issue — “How Google determines the names for bodies of water in Google Earth.”
Google has a uniform policy they call “Primary Local Usage:”
Under this policy, the English Google Earth client displays the primary, common, local name(s) given to a body of water by the sovereign nations that border it. If all bordering countries agree on the name, then the common single name is displayed (e.g. “Caribbean Sea” in English, “Mar Caribe” in Spanish, etc.). But if different countries dispute the proper name for a body of water, our policy is to display both names, with each label placed closer to the country or countries that use it.
In other languages, Google uses the common name in the language that Google Maps/Earth is being displayed in, along with an expandable button that lets you know the name isn’t universally agreed upon and lists other names that are also used.
That’s where people are giving Google a hard time, as they have (or used to have?) a policy that adopted the criteria of “primary, common, local” names for bodies of water:
[…] By saying “common”, we mean to include names which are in widespread daily use, rather than giving immediate recognition to any arbitrary governmental re-naming. In other words, if a ruler announced that henceforth the Pacific Ocean would be named after her mother, we would not add that placemark unless and until the name came into common usage.
On X, the company responded to the criticism by saying they have “a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources.”
In the case of the US, that would be the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS). Note that the two changes — the Gulf of Mexico and Denali — haven’t been published by the GNIS yet, so Google Maps is still showing the “old” names there.
I get the frustration with the arbitrary decisions of an erratic president, but this seems like a… non-issue? If the government changes the names of bodies of water, as the US government plans to do (the executive order was published by Trump on January 20th and is pending a GNIS update), Google is right to reflect that in Maps.