Letters by Burk #168: Switches
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Hi friends,
Two posts since the last letter. Both are about switches, more or less.
Google added an "unless" to its privacy policy, and there are two switches you can flip if you don't like it. And YouTube says Europe flipped a big switch on Visa and Mastercard. It didn't. Not yet.
Here's my week.
Is Europe Dumping Visa and Mastercard?
YouTube is full of videos saying Europe DUMPS Visa and Mastercard. Five European payment apps did team up in September, and Wero has 58 million users now, but your cards keep working everywhere for a while.
Read it on Medium or on Substack.
Gmail Data Can Now Shape Google Ads
Since October 16, Google's privacy policy lets Gmail, Drive and Photos data personalize your ads, if you connect those apps to Search or Gemini. The feature behind it isn't available in Europe for now.
Read it on Medium or on Substack.
⚡ AI Bytes
Google keeps connecting Gmail to more things: Chrome's AI autofill can now pull flight numbers, order numbers and addresses from your Gmail to fill out forms, opt-in and in the US for now.
Mistral released Mistral Large 4, nicknamed "Le Chonk," with open weights, and the Hugging Face announcement ranks it fifth among open-weight models on the Artificial Analysis index.
And Anthropic's IPO filing is public: TechCrunch did the math, and Amazon, with about $18 billion invested, looks like the biggest winner.
📎 From the Archive
Since this letter is about Gmail anyway: Email Is Still the Most Powerful Tool for Writers, from last November. Email is a good tool, I wrote. Not a magic one.
Read it on Medium or on Substack.
🔧 One tip
If you'd rather keep your inbox out of Google's ads, turn off personalized ads in My Ad Center. The ads you see are then based on things like the website you're on or your location. That covers Google's partner sites too. Not other ad networks, though.
That's #168. Back soon. ✌️
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