Google Gmail & Photos for Ads: Apollo Finds Zero AI Gains

Samantha: Welcome to The State of Tech, The European Edition, Sunday October twenty-fifth, 2026. I'm Samantha Lawrence.

Bob: And I'm Bob Russell. Today: cybersecurity experts warn of a Black October as AI tools expose critical web vulnerabilities, a sobering new study finds AI delivering zero measurable productivity gains outside tech, the US formally designates helium as a critical material for chipmaking, China's humanoid robot industry hits a commercial reality check, and two things worth trying today, the free open-source writing app Typora and the privacy-first browser LibreWolf. Let's start with that cybersecurity alarm.

Google Wants Your Gmail and Photos to Sell You Things

Samantha: Okay, Bob, this one made me put my coffee down. Google has updated its privacy policy, and the short version is that your Gmail and Google Photos data can now feed into ad targeting.

Bob: Which is the kind of sentence that makes you want to check your settings immediately. Ars Technica and a few other outlets picked it up. Photos and email were always the sort of sacred ground. Ads ran on search and browsing, and your inbox was your inbox.

Samantha: Exactly, that was the unspoken deal. And the timing isn't random. Google's ad business is leaning harder and harder on AI, and AI is hungry. Richer personal data means better predictions about what you'll buy.

Bob: Better predictions, more revenue. Though I'd point out that "may be used" is doing a lot of work in these policy documents. It doesn't necessarily mean a human at Google is reading your holiday emails. It means systems can learn from patterns in them.

Samantha: Which, honestly, doesn't make me feel much better. If a system infers I'm planning a wedding from my inbox and then shows me wedding ads on every site, that's still my private life turned into a targeting signal.

Bob: Fair. And there's the Photos angle. Pictures are incredibly rich data. Where you've been, who's with you, what you own. Even without anyone looking at them, the metadata and AI-generated labels are a goldmine.

Samantha: The reporting also mentions that both Google and Meta have new terms in play, and that regulators in the EU could fine up to 10% of sales if they decide the rules were broken. That's a number that gets boardroom attention.

Bob: It does, though I'd keep expectations modest. These cases take years, and companies argue they've obtained consent. The real question is whether the consent is meaningful when the option is basically accept or lose your email.

Samantha: That's the crux, isn't it? Opting out of Google isn't realistic for most people. Work, school, banking, everything runs through it.

Bob: So the practical advice is dull but useful. Go through your ad personalisation settings, see what you can switch off, and maybe think twice about which of your data lives in one company's hands.

Samantha: And if you're really uneasy, there are privacy-focused email and photo alternatives. Not perfect, not as convenient, but you control more.

Bob: Convenience versus control, the eternal trade. Google just moved the dial.

Apollo study finds AI delivering zero measurable productivity gains outside the tech sector.

Samantha: A fresh research report from Apollo Global Management, published Friday, is landing hard across boardrooms. The headline finding: despite enormous enterprise spending on artificial intelligence, there are no measurable productivity improvements outside the technology sector itself. Finance, healthcare, manufacturing, all show flat efficiency numbers. This directly challenges the story that AI is quietly transforming every corner of business.

Bob: The numbers behind that claim are striking. Apollo estimates roughly three hundred billion dollars was spent on enterprise AI tools and infrastructure in 2026 alone. If that spending is producing no measurable gain in traditional sectors, the return-on-investment question gets uncomfortable very quickly. Tech companies themselves are seeing benefits, which makes sense: they are building the tools and have the in-house expertise to deploy them. For everyone else, the gap between pilot projects and real workflow change appears to be much wider than the pitch decks suggested.

Samantha: What this shows is the implementation problem that AI vendors have downplayed. Buying a licence is not the same as redesigning a workflow. Many enterprises have deployed assistants and copilots alongside existing processes rather than replacing them, which adds a layer of cost without removing the underlying one. Apollo's analysts suggest the real productivity gains, if they arrive, will require much deeper operational change.

Bob: For European businesses the message is particularly sharp. European firms have generally been more cautious with AI budgets than US counterparts, partly because of regulatory uncertainty around the AI Act, partly cultural. That caution may now look less like laggard behaviour and more like prudence. Expect procurement teams across the continent to be asking much harder questions this quarter about measurable outcomes before signing the next multi-year AI contract.

Samantha: Quick interruption. If you listen to The State of Tech regularly, hit that like button and subscribe, that way you'll never miss an episode. Okay, moving on.

The United States formally designates helium as a critical material for semiconductor manufacturing.

Bob: The US government has officially added helium to its critical materials list, and the reasoning goes straight to the heart of the chip industry. Helium is used at multiple stages of semiconductor manufacturing: cooling, photolithography, and leak detection. The Energy Department framed the designation as a response to supply chain vulnerability, with global helium production concentrated in a small number of countries and subject to geopolitical risk.

Samantha: What makes helium interesting is that it is genuinely irreplaceable for parts of the process. You cannot substitute it with something else in extreme ultraviolet lithography or in cooling superconducting magnets. And once it escapes into the atmosphere, it is effectively gone, since helium is light enough to drift off into space. The designation unlocks tools for the US government to support domestic production, build strategic reserves, and prioritise supply during shortages.

Bob: For Europe this is a quiet but important signal. The European Union maintains its own critical raw materials list, and helium has sat on the fringes of that conversation for years. With the US now formalising its position, pressure will grow for Brussels to do the same, especially given European ambitions around chip sovereignty under the Chips Act. ASML's lithography machines, built in the Netherlands and shipped worldwide, depend on reliable helium supply as much as any American fab does.

Samantha: The broader point is that chip sovereignty is not just about fabs and designs. It extends down into the gases, chemicals, and rare materials that keep those fabs running. A single bottleneck in any of them can stall an entire production line. Expect European industrial policy to catch up on this detail in the coming months, and watch for new partnerships with helium producers in Qatar, Algeria, and Tanzania.

One Hacker, Five Thousand Dollars, a Hundred Breached Organisations

Bob: Bob, here's a number to chew on: five thousand dollars. That's what one hacker reportedly spent using AI agents to break into more than a hundred organisations.

Samantha: Less than a decent used car. Reuters has the story, based on a researcher's findings. The attacker, described as Chinese-speaking, went after more than 1,200 websites and got into over a hundred organisations, with Deere and SharkNinja among the names.

Bob: And what strikes me is the scale. This wasn't a crack team spending months on a single target. It was one person pointing AI agents at a huge list and letting them grind through it.

Samantha: That's the shift. Hacking used to be limited by human time and skill. Now an agent can probe a site, try known weaknesses, adapt, and move on, all while the person sleeps. The cost per attempt collapses.

Bob: So the economics flip. Defenders have to protect everything, all the time, and attackers just need a few doors left unlocked. Now they can try thousands of doors for pocket change.

Samantha: I'd add a note of caution, though. We should be careful about overstating how clever the AI was. Many of these breaches probably relied on known flaws and sloppy configuration. The AI didn't invent new magic, it just industrialised the boring stuff.

Bob: Which is arguably worse, no? It means basic hygiene failures, unpatched software, weak passwords, are now exploited at scale by anyone with a small budget.

Samantha: Fair point, and it's the uncomfortable takeaway for every company, big or small. Deere isn't a tiny startup. If organisations of that size got caught, the long tail of smaller businesses with thin security teams is exposed.

Bob: So what do people actually do about it?

Samantha: Patch quickly, turn on multi-factor authentication everywhere, and know what you have exposed to the internet. Unglamorous stuff. And defenders can use AI agents too, to scan their own systems before someone else does.

Bob: An arms race, but one where the attackers' entry price just dropped to the cost of a few weekend trips.

Samantha: Exactly that. The tools are cheap for both sides. The side that's tidier tends to win.

Typora is the minimalist Markdown editor that turns any laptop into a calm, distraction-free workshop for long documents.

Bob: To close out, two things you can actually use today. First up, Typora, a clean Markdown editor that takes a very different approach from the AI-heavy tools dominating headlines. It is deliberately minimalist. You open it, you get a quiet workspace, and everything else fades away. No toolbars hovering, no notification bars, no popup suggestions. Just text and a cursor.

Samantha: What makes Typora interesting is how it handles formatting. Instead of showing you raw Markdown symbols next to a separate preview pane, it renders your headings, lists, tables, and quotes live as you type. There is a focus mode that dims everything except the line you are working on, a typewriter mode that keeps your cursor in the middle of the screen, and a handful of themes to change the look. It runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Note that it is no longer free forever: after a trial period it asks for a one-time licence fee, which is modest compared with a subscription.

Bob: The practical use case is anyone who writes for a living, or who wants to. Journalists drafting long features, students working on dissertations, novelists trying to finish chapter twelve, academics wrestling with a grant proposal. The common thread is needing to concentrate without a browser tab, a chat notification, or an AI assistant offering to rewrite your sentence every ten seconds. Typora removes all of that by design.

Samantha: It also handles the file formats most writers already use. Documents are plain Markdown files stored on your own machine, and you can export to formats such as PDF, Word, and HTML. For European users there is an additional small advantage: your files stay local by default, no cloud account required, no data leaving your laptop unless you choose to sync it yourself. In a week dominated by stories about AI vulnerabilities and shadow enterprise tools, that simplicity feels almost radical.

Bob: Many users praise it as the writing tool that finally stops getting in the way. If you have been looking for an excuse to write that long piece you have been avoiding, this afternoon is a reasonable time to try it. Download, install, open, write. That is the whole workflow.

Privacy-first browser LibreWolf hardens Firefox for people who want serious tracking protection out of the box.

Samantha: And the second thing to try today is LibreWolf, a free independent web browser built on the Firefox codebase but configured for maximum privacy from the first launch. The idea is simple: take a well-known browser engine, strip out the telemetry, disable the data-sharing defaults, and ship it with tracking protection turned up to its strictest setting. No account to create, no sign-in flow, no promotional tiles on your new tab page.

Bob: What makes LibreWolf stand out from mainstream browsers is what is missing. There is no built-in advertising system, no sponsored content on the start page, no telemetry pinging back to a vendor. It ships with the uBlock Origin content blocker already installed, so ads and trackers are filtered from the moment you open your first tab. For users who have spent years tweaking Firefox settings manually to achieve the same result, LibreWolf arrives pre-configured.

Samantha: It runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and it is maintained by an independent community of developers rather than a large corporation. That matters for European users who are increasingly aware of how much of their browsing behaviour is harvested by default. LibreWolf is not perfect for every workflow, because strict privacy settings can break certain websites that rely on third-party cookies or scripts, but it includes straightforward controls for making per-site exceptions.

Bob: The ideal user is anyone who wants a secondary browser for sensitive tasks: online banking, health research, reading news without a dozen tracking pixels following along. Keep your main browser for the services that need to recognise you, and use LibreWolf for everything else. Installation takes about two minutes, and the interface will feel immediately familiar to anyone who has used Firefox at any point in the last decade.

Samantha: Today we covered: Google Wants Your Gmail and Photos, Apollo study finds AI delivering zero, The United States formally designates helium, One Hacker, Typora is the minimalist Markdown editor, en Privacy-first browser LibreWolf hardens Firefox for.

Bob: Want to know more or react? Visit stateoftech.eu or email us at info@doorzetters.net.

Bob: State of Tech, the tech world in 15 minutes.