Google is Using Your Emails for Targeting Ads AGAIN
Our top stories this week:
- Updated Google privacy policy says your Gmail might be used for advertising
- French Court’s Site-Blocking Orders Drive Quad9 Out Of France
- Discord is making its public communities more searchable, and people have concerns
- Manifestos, Fear, and ‘Loser Thinking’: Inside Proton’s AI Reckoning
TWIP Live 🔴
Updates from the Team
Upcoming Changes
This week's GitHub commits were largely administrative: fixing a broken link and some incorrect grammar.
friadev
News Briefs
This week's news briefs shared how Apple now allows selfie age verification as an option in iOS 27.2, systemd adding Rust support, and more!
Sources
Google makes a privacy policy exception to use your Gmail and Photos data for ads
Back in 2017, Google promised it would stop scanning Gmail content for targeted ads (though notably it could still scan for other reasons). This month, Google has somewhat reversed course by saying that now your Gmail and Photos can be used by their Personalized Intelligence tool across ads and other Google services. An example given by the article: "You might ask Google Search for restaurant recommendations near a hotel you’ve booked. With access to your Gmail, Search could pull up your reservation details and suggest places nearby."
Shimul Sood
French Court’s Site-Blocking Orders Drive Quad9 Out Of France
An going court case in France has finally been settled: Quad9 (the Swiss DNS provider known for blocking only malware and not keeping logs) is being ordered to stop providing traffic resolution to known piracy domains. Rather than comply (which would require them to either block the domains worldwide or start unreliably identifying French users), Quad9 has chosen to withdraw from France entirely, leaving the French with one less trustworthy DNS resolver.
Joe Mullin
Discord is making its public communities more searchable, and people have concerns
Discord announced this week that certain public communities will become publicly searchable - even from outside Discord. The stated goal is to make Discord a place for people to find useful information that's otherwise normally buried in Discord conversations. According to Discord, more than 63,000 Discoverable Servers host discussions on everything from gaming strategies and fandoms to language learning and niche interests. By making some of these conversations searchable, Discord hopes to extend the reach of its communities beyond the platform itself. It's worth noting that this only applies to Public Communities - not all public servers, private servers, or DMs - and users can opt themselves out while admins can opt out entire servers.
Lauren Forristal
Manifestos, Fear, and ‘Loser Thinking’: Inside Proton’s AI Reckoning
This week, 404 Media wrote two very damning articles about Proton. Proton appears to be heavily embracing AI, with allegations that CEO Andy Yen has "full AI psychosis." The second article (which we're linking for being most relevant) alleges that Andy is pushing devs toward unrealistic timelines, encouraging them to lean on AI far more for writing and testing code, saying that "I think by the end of this year most developers stop programming and start writing specs for tests that AI will code and run, to validate AI written code that humans will no longer be able to review. This will be the last year that we hire engineers, and starting next year we hire what we used to call product managers, to build things with AI.”
Joseph Cox
Forum Updates
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