About DMA & your linked services

The Digital Markets Act (DMA) is a European Union (EU) law that took effect on March 6, 2024. As a result of Article 5(2) of the DMA, in the EU, Google offers you the choice to link certain Google services.

Those Google services include:

    Search
    YouTube
    Ad services
    Google Play
    Chrome
    Google Shopping
    Google Maps

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/14202510?hl=en

So at least European users will be able to get personalized search and photos results without also having to share that data for personalized ads.

https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/my-ridiculously-robust-pho...

[they will not use for ads] ... unless you choose to make data from these services available to other Google services that support personalized ads

So it is more reasonable than I think most people are assuming.

Google won’t show you ads based on sensitive categories like race, sexual orientation, religion, or health.

Conspicuously absent from the "sensitive categories" is political leanings...

How do I know?

In 2023 I decided to lose some weight. I created a Google Docs spreadsheet titled "Weight 2023" and every day, added one line to it. I did not do a bunch of Google searching for weight-loss products or exercise machines, I didn't suddenly start buying supplements on Amazon; the only change I made to my online habits was to open a spreadsheet and access it every day, to track my daily weight and see whether my new exercise-more-and-eat-less routine was working.

Suddenly I started getting Play Store "recommendations" on my phone for fitness-tracking apps, weight-loss calculator apps, and so on. I had never gotten such recommendations before.

That's when I realized that yes, Google could tell what I was doing from the title of my spreadsheet and the fact that I added one line to it every day.

Driver of overconsumption.

Keeping us hooked on social media feeds.

Targeting children, making them use addictive products.

Making everything more expensive (because we are paying for the ads eventually).

Collecting our data.

Sometimes allowing malware to be installed on our systems.

Frustrating the idea that the best product should win; instread the one with the biggest advertising budget wins.

...

https://youtu.be/oR4jTvxPruw?si=CMtmM5_irok8qUBe

I'm not sure if the pile is big enough yet to make me do it, but it's getting there.

I might have to have two domains, one for critical communications and logins (banking, finances, tax, etc) and another for all those bullshit web sign ups. Ironically, it's the critical one I'd have to setup 9n a centralised SaaS (and therefore prone to such shenanigans as Google is proposing) in order to make sure communications don't get lost. Having said that, my current Google-hosted domain is free, and so it's likely been used for advertising and AI training already.

For your safety I'm sure.

Personalized ads can often be uncomfortable or embarrassing, but anyone who disables this feature should remember that you're only denying signals to yourself.

That said it will be interesting way of exploitation. If you want to find people who have certain email content, you can serve them ads manipulating them into taking an action. Like buying a scam product / malware.

Most of my photos (hundreds and hundreds of them) from the past week are of shitty untidy black spaghetti network racks that are completely beyond all saving and frankly require the building to be flattened and everything rebuilt from scratch.

So if this can help a company find a way to advertise a clean and humane way of solving this problem that doesn't involve me tracking down and deep frying the network engineer that left this unholy mess, then quite frankly I'm all for it any my cash is waiting.

Evil has a name. It begins with 'G' and ends with 'oogle'.

Hopefully you folks don't share information that is or was critical to your business or family there. Big Brother may be watching. The name is also Google.

There is so much information you shared there, if you used it, that can be used for AI sniffing. This is the new future.

srsly ppl