Foreign Delivery Man of God. Yanker of Pizzles. Winner of Biggest Ham Hog 1856. The guy who played Snape in the movies. A warm sock in the morning.
Well, yeah. I haven’t actually seen this email yet in my personal inbox, nor have I found the opt out personally. Google is kinda weird with their staggered rollouts but I figure it’ll turn up. I’m on a Pixel, so anything else would be quite odd.
edit: seems to be in the top right corner of Gemini, press your profile picture and then apps. That’s where the settings are. You can opt out of Gemini having access to any app in the list on an individual basis.
I don’t feel very concerned… That’s kind of the point of the service.
Good that there’s an opt-out.
edit: I dug around for it. They seem to mean the literal “Apps” settings page and not the “Settings” page. Every individual app that Gemini is capable of connecting to has a switch there. In Gemini, press your profile picture, then apps. In there you can both access the activity setting and decide which apps Gemini has access to.
I think the article is misunderstanding what is happening (though to be clear I think the email is at fault for that). Google is making it so that app developers can integrate Gemini better by allowing Gemini to interact with those apps. There is a menu inside Gemini where you can switch these interactions on and off (Inside Gemini, click your profile in the upper right corner and press apps in the menu).
I’m assuming from the email that this will be enabled by default which is a choice they’ve made and which absolutely could be argued as invasive. That being said you’d actively have to use Gemini and have it be active on your phone in order for it to interact with those apps.
Assuming Google records whatever you do on your phone whenever you do those things, which many privacy minded people of course legitimately worry about and feel uncomfortable with to various degrees, this is not really anything but another way for your assistant to do more things. If they want to read your stuff that’s not really dependent on a switch in the Gemini app.
So if you have Gemini entirely disabled I don’t think this is relevant. Only if you actively seek to use it and do not want it to be able to integrate with external applications will these settings be relevant to you.