Tag: google

Beware: Human reviewers may access your Google Bard conversations

Posted on by Martin Brinkmann

Tools like Bing Chat, Windows Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude or Google Bard have seen a rise to prominence this year. These advanced chatbots promise to deliver information to users who chat with them. While you can’t ask them anything, as some content is locked down, you can get answers and information about lots of things.

Ask about the Mona Lisa or the Hallgrímskirkja and you get a good overview of these items, usually. You may get instructions on fixing PC issues or your car, and even medical advice is not out of the question.

There is always the chance of hallucination, which more or less refers to it returning content that is not true. Still, many tech companies are pushing AI like crazy. Microsoft, for example, added Bing Chat to Windows and several other company products.

Google Bard and Human Reviewers

Google Bard Human Reviewers

Google confirmed on the Bard Help website that human reviewers may look at conversations. Feedback from Bard users plays an important role in improving Bard, but Google says that this is not enough. Human reviewers are “a necessary step of the model improvement process” according to the company.

The reviews, ratings and rewrites of human reviewers helps Google improve the quality of its generative machine-learning models”.

Google explains that conversations that human reviewers access are unlinked from Google accounts. Furthermore, random samples are picked for human review and “only a portion of all Bard conversations are reviewed”.

While that sounds reassuring, it is clear that input from human users of Bard may reveal their identity. Google recommends to users that they don’t reveal anything in conversations with Bard that they don’t want human reviewers to potentially have access to.

To Google’s credit, it highlights the fact that human reviewers may access conversations on the Bard website prominently.

What Human Reviewers do

Reviewers look for “low-quality, inaccurate, or harmful” Bard responses according to Google. Once identified, evaluators suggests higher-quality responses. These are then used to “create a batter dataset for generative machine-learning models”.

In other words, Google is using human reviewers to improve Bard’s responses to user queries.

How to prevent the sharing with reviewers

Turn off Bard Activity

Google Bard users have just one option to prevent the sharing of their conversations with human reviewers. This requires disabling the Bard Activity. Here is a step-by-step guide on disabling Bard Activity:

  1. Open the Bard Activity website on Google’s My Activity hub.
  2. Activate the toggle to turn off Bard Activity on the page that opens. Note that you may also delete existing conversations while there.

Note that Bard activity won’t be saved to the Google account anymore. In other words, you can’t access conversations from one device on another when the feature is disabled.

The deletion doesn’t affect conversations that has been reviewed by human reviewers already. Google retains that data and related data for up to three years according to the privacy information on the Bard Help website.

Related information may include the language, device type and location info according to Google.

Closing Words

The advice to never include personal information that could be traced back to you is as old as the Internet. While this limits some conversations with AI, it is still sound advice.

Bard users who want to include personal information in their conversations may want to turn off Bard Activity first, as this prevents access for human reviewers.

Now You: do you use AI tools?

How to bring order to Google Photos Takeout exports automatically

Posted on by Martin Brinkmann

Google Photos Takeout is a straightforward option to export all Google Photos to a local computer system. It is an excellent option to create a local backup of all photos uploaded to Google Photos or moving to a different provider.

A big problem with the takeout is that the photos are stored in multiple zip files, often hundreds of them. The number of folders depends largely on activity and time. Each zip file contains photos and a JSON file.

While it is possible to extract individual folders or all at once, doing so still leaves the photos in a disorganized state.

Google Photos Takeout Helper

Google Photos Takeout

The open source application comes to the rescue. All it takes is to point the app to a downloaded Google Photos takeout folder for it to do its magic. The application extracts all zip archives, sets timestamps correctly and will put all photos in a single folder or in monthly folders.

You need to download the photos from Google Takeout in the first step. This is done by visiting the Google Takeout site, signing-in, activating “deselect all” at the top to uncheck all export options, and checking the box next to Google Photos on the page.

Select “Next step” to continue and keep all other settings. Activate “create export” and wait for Google to inform you with an email that your download is ready.

A click on each of the download links opens the download page. You may need to authenticate yourself again before the download starts.

Extract all Zip archives. You may need to move them into a single root folder first, if there is more than one archive. The easiest way to do so is to copy all additional Google Photos folder into the first folder, so that all folders are under the same structure (Takeout\Google Photos).

Once all photos have been downloaded and all archives extracted, it is time to switch to Google Photos Takeout Helper.

Using the Helper app

Yearly folders for all photos exported from Google

First step is to download the application from the project’s GitHub repository. Visit it with a click on this link. The app is available for Windows, macOS and Linux. I downloaded the Windows version for this guide.

Run the downloaded file once it is on the local system. Note that you may get a “Windows protected your PC” prompt. This is thrown by SmartScreen, a security feature. The app is not dangerous, but SmartScreen does step in if an app is new or unrecognized by it.

Select “more info” and then “run anyway” to continue. A command prompt window opens with instructions. Press the Enter-key and use the folder browser that opens to pick the Takeout folder.

Once done, press Enter again to select the output folder. This is the folder that all sorted photos are put into.

All photos may be put into a single folder or sorted into year/month folders. Press 1 or 2 to make the selection.

Select what Google Photos Takeout Helper should do with albums in the final step:

  • 0 Shortcut — links album folders to original photos.
  • 1 Duplicate-Copy — puts photos into album folders as well.
  • 2 JSON – puts all photos into a single folder and creates a json file with album information.
  • 3 Nothing — ignore albums, which will ignore archive and trash photos altogether.

If the target folder is not empty, you need to select (1) to delete all files inside, (2) to place photos next to existing files or (3) exit the process.

The process may take a moment to complete. Press the Enter-key to finish the process and close the program window.

Once closed, open the target folder. You should see a folder structure based on your selections. Check the ALL_PHOTOS folder to access them all.

Closing Words

Google Photos Takeout Helper is a useful open source tool to quickly sort all exported photos. While not needed per-se, it may save users lots of time.