Me on my de-googled phone:

I remember getting flamed so hard for saying that Google/android was incredibly invasive tech. I was laughed at, called an apple fanboy and accused of schilling.

Sadly, it looks like I’m the one laughing now.

Not that I support this, but hasn’t Google Assistant been able to do that for years? Sending texts via the voice assistant has been, like, one of the main selling points.

They’d have to install it first.

Don’t go and manually install it.

The misinformation about this has been wild.

I got a privacy update for Gmail tools too. It used to be to enable smart tools you needed to allow google to read your email. That does stuff like automatically add calendar events for flights and such.

Now you must also allow the email to be read by their AI services too. I can’t recall precisely how it was worded, but it was an easy decision to keep the “smart” features off.

I mean, I really just use Gmail as the email address I give to sign up for sites and such, but would be good just not to have it one day.

I’m pretty sure I disabled/removed it when I got this phone. I don’t specifically remember doing it but when I get a new phone, I watch some YouTube videos on how to purge all the crap I don’t want.

I read an article that mentioned using command line stuff to eliminate it and it kind looked familiar. I think I did this. I really should write stuff down.

I haven’t turned it on. Am I safe?

Privacy-conscious Indians are gonna have a nightmare. Indians excessively use whatsapp.

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I can’t find Gemini on my phone.

These instructions are awful. There’s no Gemini listed in my apps, and Settings > Apps doesn’t show it either. But if I search for “Gemini” in settings, THEN it shows up, but doesn’t have access to anything the article says to do.

However, from that screen, I was able to apparently turn off its access to everything, and switch back to assistant, which appears to have turned it off completely, but who knows if it’s still lurking in the background.