Free, reliable software is not scarce, but with the growing risk of malware and devices that seem resistant to allowing users a factory reset option, it’s becoming harder to trust. Why risk it when you don’t have to? Why not trade a little bit of freedom for a little bit of the security that comes with a Windows OS? Gradually, as computers became commonplace, and then necessary, the risk of some goofy thing you found online to change your mouse pointer turning out to be a trojan outpaced the reward.
This, in turn, has changed the world of software. There is less room given to tinker – tinkering might be malicious, and why risk it? The people who know the most about computers are hackers and the people trying to thwart the hackers.
Using a VPN will make certain sites view that user as a bot (bot attacks tend to use VPNs) and will sometimes fully kick them out to avoid the potential headache of a bot attack. VPNs themselves are not the silver bullet that consumers want them to be – if the big apps (like Netflix, Hulu, etc.) were ever ordered to crack down on copyright infringement by the companies leasing out their IPs for streaming, they’d do it. Don’t even get started on accessing websites that technically break the law in one state or country but not another!
The popular operating systems of today don’t seem particularly pleased when users want a little more privacy than they can provide. Microsoft in particular seems hellbent on forcing mass adoption of the CoPilot AI even on personal devices, even on Windows 10 devices, and with it comes “AI Recall”, a system where the OS would take a screenshot every few seconds and store them in the same place on every single computer, allowing both the AI and anyone who could find that file a huge amount of information. It was also pointed out routinely that the screen recording function wouldn’t censor info, so if someone were filing taxes and had their SSN on screen, whelp, guess the AI knows your SSN now? Guess someone with access to that computer could ask the program, “can you show me the screen I filed my taxes on?” yada, yada.
There are reasons: Microsoft decides to let people collectively download moving wallpapers, and they get complained at for making it so easy to download malware. They potentially lose money on people switching to Mac, which won’t let them do that but is also notoriously harder to write malware for.
Better to have false positives than false negatives. Better for Norton and Kaspersky to flag entirely innocent third-party apps rather than let something slip through.
Right?
It depends. The third party apps might be infringing on your privacy. For that matter, Windows probably is too. What you actually get to do as a user today is agree to trade money and information about yourself to use your computer.
Now, AI enters the mix, and the AI is treated as a trustworthy option by default even though the evidence is stacking towards it not being that. Chatbots alone have a double-digit body count.
The entities who have my personal cellular number are a mix of family and apps needing 2-Factor authentication. I don’t need to sound professional in text. So: why is this the default? Why is it an assumption I’d want Gemini to help me here? How many people are struggling to finish a text? Further – how many of them somehow need help drafting a text to someone and don’t have the ability to go to ChatGPT or the Gemini app itself and draft it there? It has to be built in?
There are levels of societal expectation when it comes to texting. Firstly, most people don’t expect to be able to text a business at all, and if they can, it’s a break in the norm provided for convenience especially to them. The average person has been able to call a business for quite some time, but actually texting them is fairly new. There are also levels to the kind of access you’d expect to have at different sizes of business. A big corporation probably has the resources to maintain a text line. Many mid-sized service companies have a quiet expectation that sometimes texting your tech directly is the easiest way to reach them, but if you try to text an accountant you’re not friends with already, you might not get through. Small businesses often don’t have the people they’d need to monitor text lines, but micro-businesses, often comprised of a single person or a couple making things cottage-style, usually do, because the volume doesn’t exceed the capabilities of one person.
All this to say: a personal device capable of drafting professional-sounding texts without coming off as corny is really only suited to the smallest businesses imaginable, or the niche cases where individual employees are allowed to reply to customers, and anything else would be rendered redundant by the new standard of office phones which are capable of texting!
Gemini might, in an ideal world, be able to route stuff from your messages to your calendar for you… but on Android, you were already capable of doing that! The phone was already able to do that for you! Do you need Gemini’s help drafting up texts? Maybe. Maybe there’s a use case for the disabled, people who forget to send texts because they get so anxious during the writing, people with dyslexia, people who suffer from brain fog and can’t formulate a thought eloquently in text when dealing with some delicate problem, et cetera. This is not a slight to them. Needing help is not something to be ashamed of. In fact, the disabled needing help often forces websites to do things that make them more usable for everyone else, in what’s called ‘the curb cut effect’. However, Gemini’s presence here is not a curb-cut. It’s a slight to The Android OS. The need for such a product built in and opt out feels manufactured at best. Most likely, they’re hoping that putting the choice there as an opt-out encourages people to use it (and large companies are hoping LLMs and virtual assistants take off for a number of reasons, not all of which benefit the customer) rather than responding to real-life demand. Which often is ‘I wish they’d stop changing things on me’.
(If you’d like help with integrating AI smoothly into your business, get in touch with us: https://elixistechnology.com/contact/)
