XLE

To be fair, the article itself recommends it.

The messaging in the article is a bit mixed, which makes sense because it's trying to explain Google's intentionally confusing messaging, but I would like to highlight one thing:

Can you fully disable Gemini on Android? No, and that’s by design. While you can turn off activity tracking, revoke permissions, and even uninstall the Gemini app on some devices, Google is actively replacing its Assistant app with Gemini. By the end of 2025, Gemini will be the default...

If you use Android, you should not use its Assistant if you want to keep Google away from your data.

This applies whether Google calls it Gemini or not.

At least back when police were writing thousands of fake tickets, they were doing it manually...

https://www.jalopnik.com/connecticut-police-26000-fake-tickets-hide-racism-1850627875/

You basically have to go there to view the NSFW content, don't you? I looked around some server federation rules and it seems like most servers block that one's local communities. (It doesn't appear to be out of ill will for the server, as most of them still allow federation of non-NSFW communities... But I imagine it's a large chunk of data to federate with very little reward since most Lemmy servers are run on little more than donations, volunteer efforts, and fumes.)

Probably both. Climate change raises ambient temperatures, tech companies are lazy and enjoy selling more chips for more AI data centers...

I think this comment said it best:

This is an obvious, thinly-veiled advertisement for a company's services. It's widely known that ad companies track you everywhere by many mechanisms. This is why we use ad blockers of all sorts. This has nothing to do with DuckDuckGo, it's merely used as a vehicle to get clicks.

And a supplemental note from the DDG team themselves :

This title is highly misleading, implying that Google tracks DuckDuckGo searches directly, which isn’t true... please change it to be more accurate about Google analytics and other Google trackers on websites you may visit.

(copied from my response to the same post in a different community)

Well this is a Hotznplotzn post, which means OP doesn't give a damn about data collection by American companies... or anything, really, besides reminding us China Bad

What people are these? Are they real people? Do they have names or a money trail?

So... controlled by whom?

I think this comment said it best:

This is an obvious, thinly-veiled advertisement for a company's services. It's widely known that ad companies track you everywhere by many mechanisms. This is why we use ad blockers of all sorts. This has nothing to do with DuckDuckGo, it's merely used as a vehicle to get clicks.

And a supplemental note from the DDG team themselves :

This title is highly misleading, implying that Google tracks DuckDuckGo searches directly, which isn’t true... please change it to be more accurate about Google analytics and other Google trackers on websites you may visit.

This is genuinely disturbing.

A developer was planning on sneaking data collection into a product through a sketchy terms of service. That on its own should keep the app out of any marketplace.

The subsequent claim that the developer simply forgot to include this in the TOS doesn't get any extra sympathy from me. Funny the apology only appeared after the developer got caught with their pants down, isn't it?

That GitHub discussion seems to confirm it. The developers shutting down their extension immediately afterwards too just reeks of suspicious activity.

The version number for the extension in my browser (1.8.8) doesn't match the latest release that's visible on this otherwise public repository (1.8.0)

So presumably at some point "someone" "somewhere" modified or added some files to the source code of this extension out of public view... and then "somehow" got a hold of this dev account password or whatever which was subsequently used to surreptitiously push it to the chrome webstore...