Google is experimenting with a generative AI feature to create new backgrounds for Google Meet calls. This new test lets people type in a prompt to generate a background for the call.

The feature, which was first posted by Artem Russakovsii on Twitter, is part of Google Workspace Labs. That means only a few people that are part of the test will get to use it.

Google Meet is starting to roll out AI background image support.

"On Google Meet, you can use the "Generate a background" prompt to create background images using artificial intelligence. For example, you can ask Google Meet to create an illustration of a magical forest."

Artem Russakovskii (@ArtemR) July 18, 2023

As Google's support page explains (via XDA Developers), to use these features, users who are part of the test have to click Apply Visual Effects > Generate a background to open the prompt. You can type in a prompt like "Luxurious living room interior" and even select a style like "Photography," "Illustration" or "Fantasy" for reference. You can also see other suggestions for generated backgrounds based on the prompt.

In case a user finds generated content unsafe, they can provide feedback to Google about it.

Google previously experimented with AI-powered background generation when the company announced a new feature for Android in May at its Google I/O developer conference. In April, Snap also introduced a generative-AI-based background creation feature for Snapchat+ subscribers.

The search giant has rolled out a good set of features for Google Meet this year, including emoji reactions, pausing streams of individual tiles, support for 1080p streaming and video tile pairing for education users.

Apple and Google face block on taking cut from in-app purchases in Australia

Josh Taylor

5--7 minutes

Apple and Google could soon face new rules that allow app developers to charge for in-app purchases without paying a cut to the app store, the head of Australia's competition watchdog has said.

"If our country doesn't take the step to empower this so that this obligation is there, it won't be offered," the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) chair, Gina Cass-Gottlieb, said.

The changes are likely to form part of the government's response to the ACCC's consultation in December last year on a mandatory code of conduct for designated digital platforms such as Google and Apple.

In its recommendations, the ACCC called for a code that would address anti-competitive behaviour on the platforms, such as self-preferencing, unfair business dealings and impediments to interoperability and the ability for consumers to switch services.

Apple and Google have been in the midst of high-profile battles over app store rules with Epic Games, the creator of the massively popular Fortnite game. The game was kicked off both app stores in August 2020 for bypassing the in-app purchasing systems Apple and Google force developers to use, which allows them to take up to a 30% cut in sales.

Epic Games is still engaged in litigation in Australia and the US over the ban, and the case is not due to be heard in Australia until next year.

But it is likely the federal government will seek to bring in the new rules before then, with industry comment being sought in the coming weeks on the proposed changes.

Cass-Gottlieb said cases overseas demonstrate how regulation is needed to achieve change. In South Korea, the companies have been forced by legislation to offer payment alternatives, while in the Netherlands regulators only managed to get Apple to offer in-app payment alternatives for dating apps.

She said the two instances show the companies can change how they operate, but only when forced by legislation.

"We really do need to take the step that the ACCC's recommending, which is to set up a legislative framework where they can be specific for the most important digital platform service providers."

A spokesperson for the assistant treasurer, Stephen Jones, would not confirm the timing of when draft legislation might be released but said the government "is considering its response to the recommendations".

The UK is seeking to legislate new powers for the country's competition regulator to govern the digital platforms, and the EU's Digital Markets Act will probably force Apple and Google to allow alternative payment methods outside the app stores.

The Australian code of conduct would be the first cab off the rank arising out of the digital platforms inquiry. The inquiry has most recently been assessing whether companies such as Apple, Google and Meta and their creation of "ecosystems" of technologies have reduced the ability for smaller companies to compete.

National Australia Bank, for example, said in a submission to the inquiry that the expansion of the tech platforms into mobile wallets and the credit sector more broadly gave them a competitive advantage due to the amount of data they already hold on customers.

Epic Games said in its submission that opening up the app stores to alternatives would reduce the competitive harms.

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"Apple and Google's digital platforms services face few, if any, competitive constraints in mobile app distribution. Consequently, mobile app developers have few, if any, viable alternatives for app distribution," the company said. "This enables Apple and Google to unilaterally impose 'take it or leave it' fees and terms as a condition of mobile app distribution."

Free TV Australia called for data separation rules, noting that Google's advertising business had "expanded unchecked" and the integration of the different ad businesses within Google had given the company large market power.

Google in its response argued that it did not consider its suite of products and services to be a single "ecosystem", and said what it offered was in competition with other companies offering similar but different services on a product-by-product basis, such as Apple and Amazon in home devices.

Apple said its own ecosystem was largely geared towards driving sales of its hardware devices -- and that its expansion into new areas, such as home devices, improved competition for other businesses as it helped "facilitate new and expanded services from and competition with and between third-party smart home device and service suppliers".

The ACCC, meanwhile, is continuing its work on digital platforms. Last week it released a discussion paper about the largely-unknown world of data brokering -- where third parties collect and sell a range of data from social media, search engines, loyalty programs and others for applications such as audience profiling.

Cass-Gottlieb said she hopes the inquiry sheds light on the industry's practices.

"We think very few people are aware of how data is being scraped, or actually provided or sold to third party data brokers. And therefore, consumers are less likely to have explicitly consented to that collection and use of the data and also less likely to even have a capacity to challenge or opt out of that collection and use of their data."

The issues paper is accepting comment until 7 August.

July 19, 2023 An important step towards secure and interoperable messaging Posted by Giles Hogben, Privacy Engineering Director

Most modern consumer messaging platforms (including Google Messages) support end-to-end encryption, but users today are limited to communicating with contacts who use the same platform. This is why Google is strongly supportive of regulatory efforts that require interoperability for large end-to-end messaging platforms.

For interoperability to succeed in practice, however, regulations must be combined with open, industry-vetted, standards, particularly in the area of privacy, security, and end-to-end encryption. Without robust standardization, the result will be a spaghetti of ad hoc middleware that could lower security standards to cater for the lowest common denominator and raise implementation costs, particularly for smaller providers. Lack of standardization would also make advanced features such as end-to-end encrypted group messaging impossible in practice – group messages would have to be encrypted and delivered multiple times to cater for every different protocol.

With the recent publication of the IETF’s Message Layer Security (MLS) specification RFC 9420, messaging users can look forward to this reality. For the first time, MLS enables practical interoperability across services and platforms, scaling to groups of thousands of multi-device users. It is also flexible enough to allow providers to address emerging threats to user privacy and security, such as quantum computing.

By ensuring a uniformly high security and privacy bar that users can trust, MLS will unleash a huge field of new opportunities for the users and developers of interoperable messaging services that adopt it. This is why we intend to build MLS into Google Messages and support its wide deployment across the industry by open sourcing our implementation in the Android codebase.

Google's in-house VPN, which is a part of its Google One subscription, is a bit different in philosophy to other VPNs. While most other VPNs allow you to transport yourself to any part of the world you want, Google's own VPN doesn't believe in that. There's no country or region selector, and instead, you just fire it up and get to browsing again.

Google introduced Gmailify in 2016 so that you could use Gmail features like spam filtering and inbox organization with a third-party account, but that integration is currently down.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/post/545658

Inactive Google Account Policy

A Google Account gives you Google-wide access to most Google products, such as Google Ads, Gmail, and YouTube, using the same username and password.

An inactive Google Account is an account that has not been used within a 2-year period. Google reserves the right to delete an inactive Google Account and its activity and data if you are inactive across Google for at least two years.

Google also reserves the right to delete data in a product if you are inactive in that product for at least two years. This is determined based on each product's inactivity policies.

How Google defines activity

A Google Account that is in use is considered active. Activity might include these actions you take when you sign in or while you’re signed in to your Google Account:

• Reading or sending an email
• Using Google Drive
• Watching a YouTube video
• Sharing a photo
• Downloading an app
• Using Google Search
• Using Sign in with Google to sign in to a third-party app or service

Google Account activity is demonstrated by account and not by device. You can take actions on any surface where you’re signed in to your Google Account, for example, on your phone.

If you have more than one Google Account set up on your device, you’ll want to make sure each account is used within a 2-year period.

What happens when your Google Account is inactive

When your Google Account has not been used within a 2-year period, your Google Account, that is then deemed inactive, and all of its content and data may be deleted. Before this happens, Google will give you an opportunity to take an action in your account by:

• Sending email notifications to your Google Account
• Sending notifications to your recovery email, if any exists

Google products reserve the right to delete your data when your account has not been used within that product for a 2-year period.

December 1, 2023 is the earliest a Google Account will be deleted due to this policy.

Data from Google searches and social media posts can serve as an early warning about disease outbreaks, researchers at the University of Waterloo have found.

Looking at data from January to March 2020, scientists found a correlation between an increase in people Googling symptoms like cough, runny nose or loss of smell and daily COVID-19 cases.

Because people were likely to search for information on their symptoms before seeking a test, which could take days to return results, the Google search data registered the spike first.

"We were able to see that you could actually show, I would say nine to 10 days before an increase in the number of cases, that something is going to happen," the study's lead investigator, epidemiologist Zahid Butt, said.

"So in that sense, the signals you're getting from Google Trends can help you as kind of an early warning system."

The team also found a similar correlation on Twitter, although with a smaller lag time, Butt said.

"Twitter is more reactive in a sense that when something is happening then you see a lot of people posting about that particular disease. So if you look at this study, Google Trends data was better at forecasting increases in COVID-19."

While Butt said digital surveillance like this can't replace traditional methods of monitoring for disease outbreaks, it could help the healthcare system prepare for an outbreak.

"During the COVID-19 pandemic, what was happening was more reactive. When you had cases, then they were trying to increase the number of hospital beds or trying to add more resources to a place where they saw a lot of cases," Butt said.

"If you're using this system, you can look at the signals and say 'Okay, so we're seeing an increase in people using these sorts of symptom keywords and we can basically inform public health authorities or hospitals that there is going to be an increase in the number of cases of a particular disease... so be prepared."

The next step for researchers will be testing if the model can be used to forecast outbreaks of other respiratory diseases with different symptoms.

Butt said they're also investigating whether it could be used to monitor for food-borne illness or sexually transmitted infections.

Ultimately, the researchers say their findings could be used by public health authorities to develop a real-time surveillance system to flag when diseases are spiking.

Google was working on an AI-powered mobile chatbot app for Gen Z users that features interactive digital characters, CNBC has learned.

However, the company recently “deprioritized” those efforts amid an internal reorganization, according to materials seen by CNBC. Typically, when a product is deprioritized at Google, work on it ceases.

Called “Bubble Characters,” the app featured a choice of a talking digital character that would interact in conversations with Gen Z users, according to internal documentation viewed by CNBC. The company had been working on it since Q4 2021. Google declined comment to CNBC.

The app’s description states that it featured “human-like” conversations that “take action” and are “interesting for GenZ.” The conversations were powered by large language models, which are massive data sets used to understand and generate human-like text.

“What started out as something from a science fiction novel, became the next generation of human-level conversation,” the app’s description read.

In an example seen by CNBC, a cartoon-like character’s friendly voice engaged in conversation, asked follow-up questions and even offered relationship advice.

The Gen Z chatbot was one among a range of AI-powered projects using Google’s large language models in the last several months. Within the Assistant organization, which works on virtual assistant applications or two-way conversations for a variety of platforms, executives have prioritized ChatGPT-competitor Bard amid an internal reorganization that included the departure of a few key executives. Some of the Bubble Characters team members were asked to put a pause on their work on the Gen Z app to work on Bard ahead of its launch, according to correspondence viewed by CNBC.

Meanwhile, some of Google’s top AI researchers have left the company to start their own chatbot companies, drawing investments in an otherwise slow funding environment. Character.AI, a two-year-old company building a companion AI chatbot led by former Google researchers Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, raised $150 million led by Andreessen Horowitz in February.

An artificial intelligence researcher who co-authored one of Google’s most influential papers in the field is leaving the company to launch a startup.

Llion Jones, who helped write the pioneering AI paper “Attention Is All You Need,” confirmed to Bloomberg that he will depart Google Japan later this month. He said he plans to start a company after taking time off.

“It was not an easy decision leaving Google, it’s been a fantastic decade with them but it’s time to try something different,” Jones wrote in a message to Bloomberg. “It also feels like good timing to build something new given the momentum and progress in AI.”

A spokesperson for Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Since its publication in 2017, “Attention Is All You Need” has become a sensation in Silicon Valley. The paper introduced the concept of transformers, systems that help AI models zero in on the most important pieces of information in the data they are analyzing. Transformers are now key building blocks for large language models, the technology that underpins popular AI products such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

In the intervening years, the paper’s authors have launched notable startups, including Cohere, which offers LLMs to corporate customers, and Character.AI, which lets users create chatbots emulating celebrities and historical figures. With Jones’ departure, all eight authors have now left Google.

TL;DR

• Google has updated its privacy policy.
• The new policy adds that Google can use publically available data to train its AI products.
• The way the policy is worded, it sounds as if the company is reserving the right to harvest and use data posted anywhere on the web.

You probably didn’t notice, but Google quietly updated its privacy policy over the weekend. While the wording of the policy is only slightly different from before, the change is enough to be concerning.

As discovered by Gizmodo, Google has updated its privacy policy. While there’s nothing particularly notable in most of the policy, one section now sticks out — the research and development section. That section explains how Google can use your information and now reads as:

Google uses information to improve our services and to develop new products, features and technologies that benefit our users and the public. For example, we use publicly available information to help train Google’s AI models and build products and features like Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities.

Before the update, this section mentioned “for language models” instead of “AI models.” It also only mentioned Google Translate, where it now adds Bard and Cloud AI.

As the outlet points out, this is a peculiar clause for a company to add. The reason why it’s peculiar is that the way it’s worded makes it sound as if the tech giant reserves the right to harvest and use data from any part of the public internet. Usually, a policy such as this only discusses how the company will use data posted on its own services.

While most people likely realize that whatever they put online will be publicly available, this development opens up a new twist — use. It’s not just about others being able to see what you write online, but also about how that data will be used.

Bard, ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and other AI models that provide real-time information work by scraping information from the internet. The sourced information can often come from others’ intellectual property. Right now, there are lawsuits accusing these AI tools of theft, and there are likely to be more to come down the line.----