On a similar note, I recently had to enable GenAI in my Photos app just to be able to search my photos, and the photo search is now worse than I remember it being before! I need to move off Google entirely for backups but I find the cross-device compatibility and convenience of the ecosystem really hard to give up. Lately, I've started using other LLM plans than Gemini just to have some of my personal details separate from the rest of Google, which has all my documents and email, etc.

I hope that enshitification calms down a bit whenever the dust has settled on frontier AI companies and we no longer have to force this into every product imaginable. Google used to be pretty good relative to the rest of the big ad tech companies (looking at Meta/Facebook with a scowl...) at giving opt-outs and settings to personalize privacy stuff. This has been a disappointing change to see