Google Dominance Slipping, AI, and Your Security

Discover how the fast decline of Google’s search and browser dominance affects you and how to be smart and safe with their AI offerings. 

Be Careful What You Give Google Access To

In last week’s Tips Tuesday I told you why not to use the new GA4 tool that gives Google access to your traffic data.

Later in the week I saw invites from Google to a new partner program – I would just have to give access to my traffic data to have a slight chance at being promoted by them. No way.

And then I saw an invite for a new YouTube program with the same pretense.

Y’all, all of this is a ruse and you need to treat it like that junk mail you get from a car dealership with a key attached to it that may open a vault with a prize.

No matter what they promise, the product is access to your data. Don’t do it.

Is the End of Chrome Dominance Coming?

As I’ve reported over the last few weeks, the AI browser wars are coming and bots will rule the internet soon.

I believe Google is reading the writing on the wall too, and they see the end of Chrome dominance in their future.

Google depends on the data shared by Chrome users to make its targeted ads business work. And ads are 80% of Google’s revenue.

Chrome is already losing market share.

As I reported in April about the end of 3rd-party cookie tracking, Google used to have an 80% market share among the browsers, and that has dropped to 60%, and is still dropping.

I expect AI browsers, that I told you about in July, to take it down even further.

Google is scared, y’all. Even a decade of lawsuits all over the globe did not scare them as much as this does.

And I think this is what’s behind all the ruses Google is now offering to get access to our data.

Google Indexed Shared ChatGPT Conversations

One of the features that ChatGPT introduced about a year or so ago was the ability to share a link to a conversation you started in the AI and wanted to give to your team to work on.

Those links are publicly available so they can be accessed by the team member. There are no share restrictions on them.

And that means they are also available to be crawled by bots.

And that’s exactly what Googlebots did.

And then those shared conversations started showing up in Google Search for the world to see.

Here’s how to see if you have any links shared and how to turn them off.

More Bots Crawled Shared Conversations

Once word got out about this, Google deindexed the links and tagged them with noindex.

But, Google was not the only bot that crawled those links. 

Every search and AI bot on the planet crawled them too, including other AIs and even Bing and Duck Duck Go.

The info in those convos are everywhere now.

The Wayback Machine has over 30,000 of them.

And I’ve openly seen instructions posted by pro SEOs on how to grab and analyze them using Python.

I have no doubt that hackers and other profiteers have already done this too. In fact, that’s likely how word got out about it.

Is Gemini Any Safer?

When Google first introduced AI into Workspace, I jumped on it.

The main reason I preferred it was because they said what I put into my docs and spreadsheets had AI capabilities, but was private to me and the folks who I gave restricted access to.

But now Google has told us that the info in Gemini is being made available to train their AI on.

Wait! What?

That includes Workspace emails.

And there is no way to turn that off unless you’re on the Enterprise level.

Well, at least the info in the docs/sheets is not publicly available like the shared convos on ChatGPT!

What About Notebook LM?

This is a Google Labs project that is specifically geared toward businesses.

It has been on my to do list to check out ever since it became available.

But now, I’m not sure that I trust Google with my private business info anymore.

Plus, Google is notorious for starting projects and then dumping them.

Remember G+ and Hangouts? There are plenty more similar projects that millions of folks loved, but that Google tweaked into making them so hard to use that no one could. And then Google complained that no one was using them, so they dumped them.

I have a feeling that Notebook LM may fall into that flush tunnel someday. If they do keep it, I suspect it will not be for free. So, I think I’m going to take it off my to do list.

Bottom Line

Do not put sensitive info of any kind into a publicly available AI chatbot. That includes personal and business info.

At the very least, it is being shared with the AI for training purposes, even if they say it is not. No way would I trust that.

I have used AI to analyze metrics from traffic analytics to server logs. But I sanitize them first, meaning that I remove the domain name and any word in the path that could identify the site.

As for Workspace, I run my whole back office on it and don’t plan to leave it. 

As for the email privacy, every provider scans and stores them. And if they find something dangerous, they will turn the over to a human to read. 

But, training their AI with it is another matter. And I will stay on top of researching ways to turn that off, even if that off button is just there to make me feel better, which I suspect will be the case.

And I suspect it will be the same with all email providers soon, if it’s not already.

You’ve Been Tracked for Decades

The fact is, even before AI became available to us, everything you have done that is connected to a service provider or the internet has been tracked. 

Google has had AI working for it in the background for decades. They know more about every person on the planet than we realize. And that has a lot to do with why they were so hesitant to release that powerful data analyzer tool to the public.

But, it’s not just Google. It’s all the major players.

Cat’s out of the bag now with cheap AI for everyone, and now even more entities have powerful AIs to analyze everything we do online, including search, social, video, electronic payments, and more.

Smart watches track your health. Trump just announced a new single tracking service for your healthcare records. Spotify and YouTube are requiring a digital ID to “protect kids” if their AI thinks you are under 18.

There is no single Big Brother. There are thousands of them. And some are consolidating records.

If you’re thinking about trying to find ways to not be tracked, there are still a few ways to do it and stay connected. But you will lose function. And eventually they will be tracking you too. There’s just too much money at stake not to.

The point is, most folks are just now waking up to how much they have been tracked for decades and they never bothered to find out and care. So, all the righteous indignation about it now is pretty funny to me. A lot of those same people have banking apps on their phones, security cameras inside their homes, and Smart devices all over the house hooked to the same router and think they are secure and private. Not even.