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Comment by thih9 | Hacker News Reader

> I can’t use a google product without being harassed (...)

You can disable AI in Google products.

E.g. in Gmail: go to Settings (the gear icon), click See all settings, navigate to the General tab, scroll down to find Smart features and personalization and uncheck the checkbox.

Source: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/15604322

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And will that work permanently, or will I have to hunt down another setting in another month when they stuff it into another workflow I don't want it in?

Every time I update Google Photos on Android, it asks me "Photos backup is turned off! Turn it on? [so you use up your 15 GB included storage and buy more for a subscription fee?]".

Every time I open Google Photos, it does this. Every single time. It's insanely hostile.

My iPhone has a permanent red badge counter trying to get me to upgrade to iCloud. I've moved the settings icon so I don't see it normally, but it is nagging. There's other dark patterns used by Apple to try and increase their income by "asking" me to pay more.

What's even worse is that every time you sign into a google account without a phone number or home address associated with it, it screams at you to add them for sECurItY

Every time you update? How about Maps asking if you want to use advanced location every time you open it?

Yeah, if YouTube Shorts or Games are any indication, it'll be back soon! The AI Mode in Google Search comes up nearly every time I use it no matter how many times I hit "No"

YouTube shorts is an abomination... I'm so sick of the movie clips everywhere... Not to mention the AI slop in the general YouTube results... I like historical content, but the garbage content just pisses me off to no end.

Depends; in the EU and selected countries that setting was always opt-in (i.e. it was never enabled for you). Elsewhere I guess the user has to periodically check their settings, or privacy policies, etc, which in practice sounds impossible.

> Important: By default, smart feature settings are off if you live in: The European Economic Area, Japan, Switzerland, United Kingdom

(same source as in grandparent comment).

Then no, I can't use a google product without being harassed, unless I live in a limited selection of blessed countries.

Note that these countries blessed themselves via legal steps (EU ones at least) and are not blessed by Google.

welcome to not being a passport bro for a change. Thats how mostbof the world feels when another cool thing happens, but the other way around

guess we'll see in a month

This is correct but also a little misleading: Google gives you a choice to disable smart features globally, but you end up tossing out things you might want as well, such as the automatic classification into smart folders in Gmail. It feels very much like someone said " let's design a way to do this. That will make most people not want to turn any of the features that will make most people not want to turn it off because of the collateral damage"

(I desperately want to disable the AI summaries of email threads, but I don't want to give up the extra spam filtering benefit of having the smart features enabled)

This toggle _still_ doesn't turn off all the bs.

Google now "helpfully" decides that you must want a summary of literally every file you open in Drive, which is extra annoying because the summary box causes the UI to move around after the document is opened. The other day I was looking at my company's next year's benefits PDFs and Gemini decided that when I opened the medical benefits paperwork that the thing I would care about is that I can get an ID card with an online account... not the various plan deductibles or anything useful like that.

I turned off the "smart" features and the only thing that changed is that the nag box still pops up and shifts the UI around, but now there's a button that asks if you want a summary instead of generating it automatically.

I prefer opt-in vs. opt-out. Opt-out is pretentious and patronizing.

I have everything disabled for my personal account. For work, when I looked into it, it had to be disabled centrally by my company.

It needs to be much more granular than it is. For example: Turning that setting off also disables the (very, very old) Updates/Promotions/Social/Forums tabs in the Gmail interface. ONE checkbox in the sea of gmail options?

Note that this setting (only accessible from desktop) also blocks spellcheck, a feature that absolutely does not need AI to implement

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