Tag Archives: AI

Is it the end of ‘Google it’?

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For more than a decade of being online, I’ve always been a Google fan. Gmail, Chrome, Docs, I even still have a couple of the free Legacy G Suite accounts for side projects. Just like every tech nerd that’s been the “IT guy” for their friends, family and co-workers, “Google it” has been part of my vocabulary for years.

Now it seems that I’d be using or saying it less because Google Search has morphed and swallowed up by the tech giant’s push to put AI into all of its products and services.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not opposed to AI nor am I one of its evangelists. For me, It’s just another tool to get things done, if necessary. As I’ve declared in an earlier post, I only use AI in doing research and parsing the materials I’ve gathered for what I’m working on. The output, the text, all of it are my original work.

Googling for something has been annoying, not because the AI Overview is totally useless, it forces me to exert extra effort in getting to the sources, I have to scroll down a lot more to get to the links and see what other sources are available. Even before Google came out with AI Overview, its search results already needed some improvement but instead of doing that, it made AI Overview into a core feature of search which has ruined the experience of Googling for something.

A lot of users are saying the same thing, and this backlash has led to the rise of competitors like DuckDuckGo whose browser and search engine saw a 30% increase in installs over the past week. Even a Bing search is becoming more useful than the same query on Google.

Will Google pause and re-think its aggressive push for AI? Doubtful.

Will this fundamental change to Google search lead to the death of “Google it”? Let’s wait and see.

Stop Meta from Accessing your Camera Roll

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Meta wants access to the photos in your device’s camera roll. Yes, the ones you haven’t posted or uploaded online for various reasons – intimate, raw, it could even be proprietary, Meta doesn’t care, it just wants to feed it to its AI.

To turn off this feature and stop Meta from getting to the photos in your camera roll, do the following:

  1. Open the Facebook app and make sure you’re signed into your account.
  2. On the upper right corner, tap on your profile pic to open the Menu section.
  3. Scroll down and tap on Settings & Privacy.
  4. Select Settings.
  5. Scroll down and tap on “Camera roll sharing suggestions”.
  6. Turn off both toggle switches labelled “Custom sharing suggestions from your camera roll” and “Get camera roll suggestions when you’re browsing Facebook”.

If one or both of those toggle switches are already on, then Meta is actively scanning, processing and retaining your photos to train its AI. Turning off those toggle switches will stop it.

Facebook voice messages transcribed by contractors

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Have you ever sent a voice message through Facebook Messenger? If so, there’s a great chance that someone else might have listened to it and even made a transcription. That’s right, someone else has heard and written down those words you intended only for your friend, family or special someone. Bloomberg reports that Facebook has hired contractors to transcribe voice messages sent through its Messenger app/service.

While Facebook uses AI to mine or analyze our chat conversations in Messenger for information so that it can serve ads, give suggestions like canned responses or what emoji to reply with, it’s clear that it’s not yet good enough to analyze voice messages.

Their solution is simple – outsource it to contractors and have their workers literally listen to the voice messages and transcribe it for the AI to digest. Simple yet has ‘invasion of privacy’ written all over it. In red.

Is Facebook allowed to do this? It seems we have given it our permission to do so:

The Facebook data-use policy, revised last year to make it more understandable for the public, includes no mention of audio. It does, however, say Facebook will collect “content, communications and other information you provide” when users “message or communicate with others.”
Facebook says its “systems automatically process content and communications you and others provide to analyze context and what’s in them.” It includes no mention of other human beings screening the content. In a list of “types of third parties we share information with,” Facebook doesn’t mention a transcription team, but vaguely refers to “vendors and service providers who support our business” by “analyzing how our products are used.”

Facebook Paid Contractors to Transcribe Users’ Audio Chats by Sara Frier, Bloomberg.com

Other companies like Amazon, Google and Apple have done the same in order to improve their AI services Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri respectively but has stopped the practice after they got criticized for it. Facebook has also recently stopped it as well, for now.

I’m not yet sure how this sits with privacy laws in each country around the world. In the Philippines our own Data Privacy Act is quite stringent with this regard and will be the subject of a follow up to this post. In the meantime, bear in mind that the next time you send another voice message in Messenger, someone else could listen to it at any time and most likely, without you knowing.