Dear Googles: Stop asking
plus.google.com
plus.google.com
There is no way I could suggest my friends and family sign up to such an intrusive service, so I quickly deleted my own account.
It's an absolutely stunning achievement to create a web-site that's even more offensively intrusive than Facebook. I hope Google are proud.
And facebook also will opportunistically ask for phone verification when its scrubbing system thinks you might be creating a 'fake' account.
Likely they'll try again for #4.
It was a lot more than that.
I certainly get the feeling that Google's halo is slipping.
I you how much the thought pains me.
Though I'll likely end up with a smaller provider somewhere. Gandi.net or Sonic.net both have very strong pro-privacy and freedom reputations.
How exactly does this help keep your identity safe? Because they don't have your phone number tied to your account? How many times have you put your phone number in your emails to people? I looked, and over the last year I've sent my number to people over 150 times. I used to have it in my sig. How many people do that?
It seems like you and others are fearful of Google's actions because you are fearful of the government's actions. Remember, Google freaked out about PRISM, and the result was them encrypting traffic between their data centers to PREVENT the government from spying on your data: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/google...
i'll consider doing that whenever facebook stops showing me sex related ads (condoms, pseudo-dating sites, etc.), bidding/daily discount sites, etc. and no, these ain't retargeting ads. the only decent ads i see are the retargeting ones.
it doesn't matter how many times i "hide this ad > Why did you hide it? > reason x" that it will continue to show me related ads that i have no interest in. "targeted" is one of those over-used buzzwords that i'm still waiting to do what it is supposed to do - i won't hold my breath.
Or do you believe when you give your phone number to Google, it's obfuscated, not indexed or searchable, and not permanently associated with you for their current or future use?
Next step - has anyone confirmed your identity yet?
It doesn't matter the technical details of whether the number is easier to search, it's the intent I find disturbing about this.
http://i.imgur.com/YLgZ7t6.jpg
No, it's to point out that once your privacy has been compromised, you might not be able to undo the damage.
So, there's no way I'm going to give up my phone number in exchange for a log-in on a free web-site.
Just so that you know. No need to worry about giving up what's already given up.
I suppose they can store other people's address books because it's the "legitimate interest of a third party". I'm pretty sure they can't then use that data (my phone number) for any purposes beyond the third party interest - which means they can't use it for advertising, or to link to any user profiles they may have on me. Basically, they can store address book data, but they can't look at it for their own purposes.
That obviously doesn't apply to US persons, who have no data protection right - hence the horror stories of "friend suggestions" that have obviously come through service providers peeking at address books. I wonder how they can practically filter out EU citizens from that - I suppose it's easy to spot an EU phone number.
(Just to head off the inevitable "Google doesn't care about EU law" scoffing... I think you'll find they do. They only get to export Europeans' personal data to the US because they've agreed to uphold the Safe Harbour principles. If they abuse that privilege, they'll have to do a lot of expensive re-engineering.)
They think they are Google - you know, the guys that made the Internet searchable. I'm pretty sure they know what they are doing.
Call verification is used by many services to establish ownership of an account, and to provide a fallback mechanism that automates the recovery of an account. Google likes to automate the shit out of things. This is no different.
I hear that you are angry about their policies, but I really don't hear why you are angry other than it's 'intrusive'. Are you afraid they are going to do something horrible with your phone number but not your searches? Do you have similar concern and passion for what the NSA has done? Are they related to each other?
I've been using the internet for well over a decade now. The number of services I've signed up for must be in the hundreds.
I've never had to verify my identity unless a monetary transaction has been carried out, and then it's to my bank rather than the merchant.
Nothing I get from Google+ needs any confirmation of my real identity.
Now we're getting to the nut of the real argument.
Google would like to assign a face, name and phone number to every Google account. And why is that? For various reasons. A face and a name is very valuable for targeted ads. And a phone number associated with every Google account will help Hangouts. Maybe it will enable sending SMS from the web to any phone and also Voice users can cal from the web from their Google account. Thus, Google achieves their aim of disrupting the carriers and making the phone number irrelevant.
That's just the way I see it anyway.
Making money actually came years later. Google used the method of "get a zillion users and we'll figure out money later."
Also, as the web and search evolved, people who ran web sites figured out what they'd need to do to get found more easily by search engines. It's possible that the rise of SEO was more responsible for a better search experience than improved site ranking algorithms.
I don't think SEO really started happening until Google outlined the basic idea of PageRank - until there was something to plausibly target. At which point 1999-2000 were the years of hideous link farms. I sure remember those.
I was an avid user of AltaVista back in the day but what killed it, and why I jumped on Google as soon as it was available was back then, it was simply less polluted.
There isn't an hour that goes by that I don't search for a few keywords ... like ... freebsd openvpn push ... and guess what ? Results 1 and 3 for that query do not contain the word push.
Every day I am running into this and every day I miss altavista.
https://www.google.com/search?q=freebsd+openvpn+push&tbs=li:...
Is there a way to switch this on permanently?
This is not even vaguely true. Google's algorithm was a bit better, their page was cleaner, and they weren't trying to push you into other services or wall you into any weirdness.
If google had pulled the shit they pull now back then, I never would have switched to it. I switched to google because they convinced me that their simple, honest strategy was based on some sort of a company value rather than just a strategy of leaving profit on the table until they could drive all competition out of business and ask for your firstborn. Corporate values? That's what I get for believing in science fiction.
The biggest advantage Google had was their listings were all search results, whereas most competitors had paid listings included in the results, but at the top of course.
But that was, you know, over 15 years ago.
A huge data set mapping the search terms -> clicks is what made all the difference IMO.
Moreover, in the event that it changes, I have a Google verification problem.
So the fact that I don't trust Google not to leak it somehow is by the by, although that is why I also disabled their "web history" tracking service. No, what really annoys me is that they, and every other service that overcollects, are creating future data management debt for me to deal with. Like I don't have enough already.
Not that phone numbers need to change any more anyway. With universal portability, unless you move outside of the country, you can keep your phone # with you.
One of the leading services targeted by account generation farms to launch spam.
They're unlikely to reinvent account verification from scratch for each of their products though.
Not sure if that statement is specifically related to your wife having to "provide a phone number", but... Facebook does the same thing.
I suspect that different people see different behavior.
Or is the pursuit of profit far more important than the perception of the brand overall?
Right now, and for the last year, the brand is being severely tarnished in all of the networks I have, tech and real-life. I don't see them winning on any front. A Pyrrhic victory.
We are still a good five or six years away from the point where Google would have to worry about alienating the users whose data they sell, and with the decreasing amount of Internet education most users get before starting to surf the web, the distance from that point is increasing. They thrive on the eternal September.
As for the Eternal September... I used to think it had been just a momentary problem that led to the unfortunate demise of USENET. I am starting to wonder if it wasn't, in fact, a first symptom. Programmers from my generation ought to have been so happy to see this happening -- the WWW available to everyone, connecting everyone. If only it weren't for the wrong reasons. The taste of my dream turned out to be a lot more bitter.
As for the Eternal September... I used to be able to talk to people on the internet, with threads, groups, and killfiles, using the software of my choice. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
I imagine MySpace were saying something similar for a couple of years as Facebook started really taking off, and Yahoo probably thought no new search engines were a threat a year or two before Google arrived.
The Internet is a funny place. A lot of Internet users move in herds, which means a disruptive newcomer can grow very fast if the whole viral networking effect kicks in, but usually when that happens one or more established players must fall to create the space.
On the other hand, MySpace was not hooked on so many and so important portions of one's Internet life, nor did they have the advertising upper hand that Google has.
With Internet, we've had our innocence time, with few advertising, relatively clever users and smart, responsible usages.
But Internet will become the new plaza for the populace, filled with orange blinking advertisers, awful designs that only lowerclass people can accept (think saving a file in Windows 8 or just... facebook), like supermarkets who swap alleys around just to make you walk in front of new products, like neon lights which look awful as they try to catch your attention. And websites will get bugs as they grow old, because margins will be shallow again. The story of any long cycle in economy - 2012 was the top of the curve.
And Google will fill perfectly in the middle.
Social networking is today's TV, that you must participate both as a way to spend your life and to not be alienated from all the other people in your lives that use and talk about social, or TV, or whatever the next thing will be.
Even Facebook's ad buy system is better than Google's current one, and being worse than Facebook's ad buy system is an achievement that I always assumed would require years of practice and a lot of natural talent.
Also, you created an account an hour after this article was posted just to type a banal cliche that we've all had to endure endlessly?
Google is now a mega-corp, comprised of thousands competing for finite success outcomes (raises & promos). It is also data driven hence they look at metrics that are considered success like registers over abandonments. Brand tarnish is a long term outcome, therefore it can not be seen in typical a/b testing cycles. Hence it is ignored, or even gamed upon for short term metric gain. This is true for all corps that equate success with short cycle data driven metrics.
A copy of the full text can be found here: https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX
There's no platform here at all. Not externally (who develops for or on Google as a platform?), but apparently not internally either.
Because the haphazard way in which different properties interact, the way functionality and data bleeds through, and all the damn bugs because of it are all signs of products and data being hooked up to each other with duct-tape.
But who is implementing and setting all the short term 'features', lower mgmt and ICs. The issue is that ideology is not enough for measuring success in mega corps, data has to used. The translation form ideology to metrics is where they fail.
Because despite being a mega-corp, comprised of thousands [...], it's still called and named `Google`, singular. They naturally map it to one entity ; not because they are stupid but because the entity is interacting with them solely through that one identity and they don't have incentives to care for the inner workings of that entity.
> It is also data driven hence they look at metrics that are considered success like registers over abandonments. Brand tarnish is a long term outcome, therefore it can not be seen in typical a/b testing cycles. Hence it is ignored, or even gamed upon for short term metric gain. This is true for all corps that equate success with short cycle data driven metrics.
Like: "we don't care about those abandonments because we got these phone numbers which are more valuable and show we are a trusty brand" ? Makes sens (no sarcasm).
Users are easily persuaded. A majority of users will give in just so the damn thing shuts up. They probably use the metrics to hand out bonuses or engage in pointless contests leading to gamification.
It doesn't take a village to make a Picasso, and any attempts to try are going to result in failure. Google needs leadership.
In the spirit of Google: +1 for people and +2 for companies now actively moving away from almost all Google properties because they're becoming so unpleasant and/or unproductive to use. I know they're all about being data driven and running empirical tests: that's why the {expletive deleted} page moves around every time I come back and visit something, which is probably the single most annoying thing they've been lately. The very fact that they're running so many tests is materially reducing the value of their services to us.
Ironically, our exodus started with abandoning our business G+ pages, because they have generated so little interest that they aren't even worth a few minutes now and then to update them any more. It appears that literally no-one we care about is actually using Google+.
But I didn't say that the plan was a good one (or a bad one), just that this action and similar ones do seem to be in accord with that top-down plan rather than the result of independent action by lower-level people.
The thing that made me mention it was that so many of the reasons given by so many of the people involved are fundamentally the same. If what I've seen is at all representative, Google are increasingly perceived to be a security/privacy risk (though this is hardly unique among cloud services) and perhaps worse for them, they're not perceived to be a stable long-term bet (too many dropped products, too many unwanted changes happening too fast, nothing special in terms of quality or features, and little support for users).
Some of these factors presumably won't be as damaging to Google in the consumer market, or at least not as quickly, so I don't see their main advertising business dying any time soon. However, to businesses with real money on the line and organisation-wide IT strategies to plan, Google's overall offering looks increasingly unattractive. For example, Google Docs/Drive/Apps have been tried by various groups I know. None is still happy with them, and several have been forced to move at least some of their activities to alternative systems because the Google ones just weren't capable of getting those jobs done. Chrome is another example I've more often heard mentioned between curse words than flattering ones recently. And I already mentioned in another post the horrible experience we had trying to organise some Google Ads.
Google's resilience appears to stem in part from traditional alternatives shooting themselves in the foot by also pushing to cloud-based offerings and therefore immediately running into similar concerns. Even so, Google seem to be getting worse faster than everyone else.
Personally, I make use of some Google products but have been very consciously trying to shift away from them. Too much data, too long a retention period, and too obvious a target for snoops (ours, theirs, black hats). I'm increasingly uncomfortable with the prospect.
A few years ago, now, I was at a conference largely serving NGOs and the question of cloud computing came up. The idea was fairly novel then, and I expected the discussion to focus on technical aspects -- "how do we move our services to the cloud" type questions. Nuh uh.
It was virtually all about privacy, data control, jurisdictional control, and other legal issues, as well as some discussion of lock-in and similar issues. Now, I think of these things, and they come up on a corporate context, but for these people, many of whom deal with refugees, undocumented aliens, whistleblowers, and others basically in fear for their livelihoods if not their lives, these were all very, very real issues. And this was years before Snowden's disclosures.
Mind, I've followed online privacy issues for a few decades (and butt heads regularly with Lauren Weinstein on G+ over how significant Snowden's leaks were -- I say they're tremendous, he generally claims otherwise), but this level of direct awareness and concern in a largely non-technical audience was eye-opening.
For myself:
I decided to check out G+ and have stayed with it (though I quickly deleted my Real Name account). It has mostly not been particularly useful ... until early in 2013 where I found that rather than commenting about G+, I was actually using it to engage on other topics. I still see it as flawed (and quite possibly fatally so) in conception, but the technical underpinnings are very solid: the back-ends are fast, stable, and highly reliable, and even with rapid and continuous development the site rarely if ever breaks.
Utility-wise it's been another story. The DOM is so bloated I can rarely keep more than a tab or three open (and constantly have to re-kill those to reclaim RAM), the interface is atrocious, the underlying data and interactions models are utterly broken, and more (I've posted long rants many times, they're on my G+ profile, and I'm really beyond caring now). I went to the extent of very extensively modifying the UI through a monster (nearly 2000 lines) CSS stylesheet fixing endless annoyances (to be fair, I do this to many sites, HN included, but none is as extensive as G+). Adding joy to this is Google's obfuscated CSS (it's run through some sort of minimizer) which does wholesale class renaming periodically.
But other than G+ I've been trying to cut Google out. I set DDG as my search engine, returning to Google for a while before committing again this past June. The results are actually quite good, and though I return to Google occasionally, the bulk of my search is DDG.
I've got an Android device tied to Google as well, which I'd very much like to replace with something independent of it.
I make use of a few other services, though mostly not logged in.
And it's not that Google doesn't provide utility. I just have very serious problems with it (or anyone else) watching every breath I take.
Original link: http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2013/09/20/sex_a...
The consistency and duration of the push certainly makes it appear to me to be a top management directive. Which is among the reasons my faith and trust in the company has fallen so drastically as I've watched its G+ offerings evolve.
That, or all of this is just a huge coincidence. I find that to be the least plausible explanation.
Clearly this is a unified strategic approach. It's one Google doing this, not dozens of units that happen to accidentally all try to do the same things the same way at the same time. It's the total unity part that actually makes it more creepy.
Am I the only one to find this statement ironic?
One of the biggest arguments against Google+ and its drive to one account/real names is that individual people don't have unitary identities, let alone companies.
They push another inch forward in terms of trying to force me to cross-link products or use something I don't want to, and I'm going to abandon their entire product suite, permanently.
I'm just one consumer, but that's how I'm going to vote, with my feet heading out the door. I don't like being abused in exchange for my decade of loyalty. Fortunately it's really trivial to switch off of Google for about 95% of what I use them for.
Most people have terrrrrrrrrrrible password practices. Absolutely abysmal. And they are keeping extremely sensitive data inside their email as well as using their email address as the key to accessing many other websites and pieces of sensitive data. Think about how screwed you'd be if you lost access to you email address. Now think of how many people DAILY probably loose such access. Phone numbers are an easy, mostly reliable way to identify someone and give them access back to their email address without an investigation and without human intervention.
Plus, let's just get reasonable for one minute here. Google already has your phone number. Ever given it to someone via gmail? Someone else ever given your phone number to one of their friends through gmail? They're just asking for permission to send you a text.
How I lost access to my Google account and couldn't get it back
How a hacker compromised my Google account with social engineering
etc.
I'd rather have my "sensitive" data compromised than have some multinational advertising company that has been compromised by every major government on the planet have access to me at any given time.
And its as annoying as having someone stand in your kitchen every morning and say "A bowl of bran Sir, its good for you, best thing to eat Sir, other options are inferior". I hate Bran, I'd rather eat toast, I'd eat fruit, I'd rather wait till lunch time. But that butler person won't go away, he shows up at lunch time, an dinner, and when I just feel like a quick snack down town.
I don't care how much better it is for me, I already know, I just don't want it.
And lastly, if someone steals your phone, with your a mail client on it, it is way easier for identity theft to occur, not harder.
They are far from the same thing, and why do you think it is worse?
Its not a future I want this world to have, and we are unfortunately enabling it, as always, with poorly thought through best intentions.
How exactly is this true? I encrypt my phone's hard disk and I encrypt all of my SMS communications (locally) with https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.thoughtcri...
It's no harder than if someone steals your laptop. The same measures you would use on a laptop (FDE, TLS) are available on phones. The argument can certainly be made that SMS is an insecure form of 2-factor auth, since they can be easily intercepted in transport (though if you use TextSecure someone who steals your phone can't get them!), but that's why we have the google authenticator app.
Phone doesn't lock while they run with it as they are touching the screen, they get away from the user and disable the security features. You are compromised, phone is compromised, thief's win.
Or so the papers say, and several female friends who have had this happen to them at evening events (not identity theft, but the snatch and grab).
I don't doubt that this is a real threat for sure, but there are measures you can take to prevent it from happening.
But in a worst case scenario how quick could someone determined actually compromise you? minutes? less time than you'd wait on hold during work hours, let alone waiting till the next day?
If someone steals your phone and it's logged into all your personal accounts and you don't contact your mobile provider to shut the sim-card off then yes you are screwed. Also I would suggest cancelling your credit cards if someone steals your wallet.
But interestingly, phone auth changes as your account becomes more valuable. If your Google account unlocks everything you have, then a targeted stealing of your phone number gives the attacker everything.
If the target is leaving the country without roaming for a few days, an attacker might even get the number flipped back before they return. A non-security conscious victim, upon return, might just wonder how they forgot their password, reset it again, and move on. (That's another reason why Google and others remind you when you last changed your account settings.)
If you develop a way to recover people's email accounts that is simple for consumers, requires no human intervention, and is more secure than phone numbers, patent it and make millions. Seriously, this is a hard problem to solve and companies will gladly pay you for a better solution.
Never really thought about it before but Google definitely has the video market locked. Vimeo, dailymotion, liveleak, et al don't even come close in terms of content.
And if you do have a Mac built in the last 4 years, you're not missing much by using Flash. Difference in CPU usage is negligible and I haven't used an in-browser HTML5 player that wasn't shitty compared to its Flash implementation.
The negative of non-Flash movies (YouTube has some) is that they auto-play. Few things annoy me faster than sound coming from a background tab. I generally close them immediately (I usually queue up stuff to look at).
It's interesting, though. In Hollywood, Vimeo seems to be the default choice for professional work. Up and coming directors have their short films and reels up there. And there are some password-protected videos top pros use for work on very big name films.
It's weird how markets segment like that.
Thus if you find a link to a video on Vimeo there's a good chance there's some semblance of quality. Especially if it's a gaming video, because they do allow machinimas. They fostered that artsy niche and in the process became something totally different from YouTube.
There are a dozen news + comments that all have a slightly different threshold for what stays on the site, determined by the tastes of the community.
Why haven't more video sites emerged with a similar ethos?
Because if they touched commercial music or video at all (even by accident or if it's fair use), they'll be sued into oblivion and/or asked to implement the same level of "content protection" YouTube has today (effectively the same thing because a startup video site wouldn't have the resources for that). Remember, the only reason YouTube exists today in any sort of recognizable form is that they got together with Google's checkbook and Google's lawyers. That gave them the legal ammunition to force some kind of settlement (albeit a deeply flawed and problematic one, between ContentID and non-DMCA takedowns, among other things).
If a YouTube competitor is going to emerge, it's going to come from a big company. That's not impossible, but most (all?) of the likely candidates would bring their own (similar or different) serious flaws to the table. And even then they'd need to develop a "content protection" scheme roughly as good as YouTube's - which would take serious machine learning chops on top of everything else, whittling the list even further.
If Google ever becomes involved in defense work, with this attitude, we are fucked. Imagine combination of armed drones, Google's self-driving car technology and a vast amount of real time data on everyone everywhere.
Now where did I put that tinfoil hat?
I still use Google Search but I got rid of my Google account, got rid of the Chromebook, moved my email to Fastmail, and moved to Firefox for browsing.
I recently deleted everything on my account (G+ & YT included) and it feels great to be free from the constant harassment. I only have Gmail active now. I'm still looking for a new mail provider but once I have one, my relationship with Google is over as far as I'm concerned.
It really depends on how much you need to use Google's services.
NSA's got all my shit anyway, at this point. If I can find an equivalent product that doesn't have the .gov down their throats, I'll jump ship tomorrow. But for now...
Why? O365 is a solid alternative to GMail. Nothing to be ashamed about.
The hard part about setting up your own email server is, by far, ensuring deliverability. New/dynamic addresses tend to not be trusted by other mail servers, so that is really the most "dangerous"/time consuming part. So, why not do the following?:
* Set up your home server to accept email. If it goes down for a few hours, hey, pretty much every mail server will retry for a few days, so you're pretty much guaranteed to get all messages. * Set up your home mail server to use something like Mailgun or Mandrill to actually send messages. I'm using Mailgun and they have a fantastic interface, giving me a checklist of things I need to do to be able to send emails with pretty much guaranteed deliverability (DomainKeys, SPF, etc).
This would both allow you to receive mail on any domain you wanted, keep your email safe from the NSA/whoever (you can make your home server TLS-only) and ensure that you can send email from any domain you own with great deliverability. Plus, it's free (unless you hit Mailgun's 10k mails/month limit, which is pretty unlikely).
This could pretty much be a Docker image, so setting it up would just be a "docker run some/image". I have various domains, and right now using Gmail is a pain in the ass because I can't change my primary domain. I have to keep my Google identity tied to my 10-year-old email address even though I never use it any more.
I'd lose spam filtering and search, but eh, there are good spam filters around.
That's actually a really good idea, especially as reliability will be higher. My connection rarely drops and I have a static IPv6 too so DNS may be far easier to configure.
Edit: An idea to ease transition would be to setup the vacation responder in gmail to remind your contacts about your new address.
Would anyone be interested in me doing a writeup of this? It sounds like maybe it should be put out there.
Else you'll never be able to close your google account.
+1 for a write up. Last time I tried making a mail server I got it to send mail but it couldn't receive any.
Yes.
Coincidentally, I wrote about the first half of this setup yesterday:
It seems to me that until DNSSEC becomes widespread, there isn't secure way to mandate TLS. (OK you could come up with some hack using HTTPS, like check https://domain.com/smtpsettings for each domain to determine if TLS is required.)
Of course running your own server does prevent wiretaps being implemented by Google, or retroactive access to your mailbox. But it's hardly "keeping your email safe from the NSA".
A large number of major email providers support STLS, so the uptake is better than you might think. A lot of smaller shops don't. How that affects you will really depend on what your mail use patterns are.
And you can always use PGP/MIME or S/MIME. That's increasingly prevalent in corporate networks, though starting from near nil it's still pretty near nil.
Running my own mail server for over a decade, and never had a deliverability problem. Of course, you shouldn't try to send from a dynamic IP, but what is a "new" address?
It's slightly annoying and I may migrate off of gmail in the future, but for now it prevents this problem.
* Host myself and deal with possibly losing mail, high spam, rejected mail or downtime.
* Pay for a service to handle this for me (either partially like Mailgun or fully like FastMail).
If I want more uptime, I could lease a VPS. Either way, I have to pay up somewhere (money or loss of data). If I'm paying, I'd rather back a company that cares about privacy, like FastMail.
I think of it as similar to giving identifying information to my credit card company when I'm calling them. (Though citi pissed me off asking me for the full credit card number a few years ago).
Facebook has taken an interesting more sneaky turn recently with their messenger app. Since now they can collect phone numbers without explicitly asking for them.
Once it's given to them just once.. Its with them forever.
2. Regarding chats, I think it's in cookies, so when you change browsers - the whole QA thing repeats.
3. Google of course wants to know about you more than your mama and spouse combined, but at least some of that pestering experience is due to the fact that Google is prone to employing lousy programmers as much as any other corp.
4. No one is forced to use Google's free services and be put up with begging for personal information so that implies the freedom to switch to any other provider away from Google.
It's like the Delta Airlines management team who had a special bus to the airport and a hole in the fence to go straight to their first class seats in their airplanes, or senior Apple employees who (less so now) appeared to never to actually travel outside California and London.
If you don't see a problem you will never fix it. Google and Facebook folks are content with living inside their bubble, while the rest of us get more and more frustrated and use their products less and less.
Nothing makes like a website less than annoying screens I have to click through every time I go there.
In all, a long litany of frustrations.
My clearly stated preference was to not link my pseudonymous identities on G+ and YouTube, as well as not to link either to real-world identifiers. I'd actually posted on the custom URL issue (phone number required) a few weeks back. That identifier then turned out to show up as a reverse-lookup to your G+ account. There are people who know me IRL and have my phone number. I'd prefer they did not identify it with my G+ identity.
Things I've explicitly turned off, because I dont want to be bugged all the time.
The only way to move on was to edit the URL back to what it was before I got redirected.
Google+ is all about coercion. There's really no mistaking about that.
Edit: For Youtube, if you turn on safe mode, hiding comments, it may prevent the box talking about the new comments section, but now I do not see see it with it off, so I may be wrong.
You couldn't reverse the hash to determine the fingerprint, but if fingerprints matched, you'd have identical hashes. Splitting out different data records might help create probabalistic matches (e.g., n of m hashes match for an identity probability of p).
Tor would of course address IP issues. Privoxy could handle browser fingerprinting.
I think it's a result of a lesson learned with Buzz. There was a lot of media hype about it, but very little push to the masses (compared to Google+). And, rightly so, it died off. Cause on its own merit, it kind of sucked and got no traction, despite the formidable Google force behind it.
With Google+ - the last hope of the Empire in social media battle - everything goes.
Basically, the existing user base doesn't matter. So they might as well go straight to forcing people onto it, since they failed to lure them onto it.
Personaly one that has been grinding my gears recently is avast on a pc which constantly keeps popping up a link to read about FB privacy, I don't do Facebook and with that my privacy is alrady covered. yet this pop's up many a time, I use 3G internet upon that PC so suspect every time I get a new IP (often) then the advertising popup for the self promoting article gets flagged up again.
In an age of computers able to remember what we forget or wish to forget it is somewhat annoying to be asked the same question over and over again in the hope you will eventualy say yes too there satisfaction and voiding the upmteen no responses you have said. Yet once you say yes you aint asked again if you would like to say no instead, funny that.
But this is the case with software you can't download, hack about and compile to taste. With that I support this mentality as it will only push people into learning something new. That said if I ever have a problem with a company like google can I ask them umpteen times the same question until I get the answer I want? Only fair in implied contract law perhaps :).
With that the days of software acting like a small kid constantly asking for a bike at for Christmas will be with us for a while longer until the yes and no response have equal value too them. Until then, is it yes yet? is it yes yet? is it yes yet?.....
Today, it's a cell phone number for the "benefit" security. Tomorrow, they will ask for a SSN in order to use Gmail.
They offer free services for one reason, and one reason only... and it isn't because they like giving away stuff.
Google is offering "X" service so they can bargain your data out of you, more and more of your data. That, IMO, is the reality of the situation. I would challenge that most people don't understand fully the bargain they are getting.
Google knows most people don't understand this bargain.
Now, that said, do they offer value in the services they provide in exchange for this data? Sure.
If you want that value, they will either:
1. Get your data, and quit asking for it.
2. Not get your data, but keep asking for it, as many times as they want, because it's their sandbox.
And here's the kicker in my opinion, millions of people are going to keep signing up for and using their free services, and keep offering their data in exchange for using their services.
The Google world just keeps on turning...
The search result looks pretty good...
This brings up the Google Interface. I used to be able to use + in front of a term I wanted to be treated literally. Now I have to use quotes, which is 4 keystrokes (including shift) instead of 1 for plus.
Google also has removed my ability to block certain URLs from your search results. Now I cannot avoid the re-linker web sites, and occasionally get suckered into clicking one. That is really irritating.
In spite of this, Google still provides the best search I've seen. I recently compared Google and Bing in an obscure search. Google had 45 hits, Bing 15.
Regina: Gretchen, stop trying to make 'fetch' happen. It's not going to happen
>The Panopticon is a type of institutional building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. The concept of the design is to allow a watchman to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an institution without them being able to tell whether they are being watched or not.
Thank you for all the free services you have delivered over the years. Please do not listen to all those complaining about stuff they get for free. As free as they were to sign up, they also have a choice to opt-out at any moment.
They blindly agreed to the Terms of Service which warned them, yet now complain as if they are entitled to anything.
Look at them and laugh
After the recent upgrade, it did ask twice to turn on Talk for SMS messaging. I said no both times and it hasn't asked me since.
There's also the question of to what extent you can opt out in the modern world. Got a mobile phone, pretty much essential to work or life these days? Your life is now beholden to Google or Apple. So yeah, people damn well do have a right to complain, and "just don't use it" is a fatuous thing to say.
Useful reading from a real-life example: https://plus.google.com/u/0/115668950429167517685/posts/JcPQ...
Funny. Do you really think they're same? A company making money by SELLING PRIVACY, and a company making money by SELLING HARDWARE?
A company exists to make money. And all what they do is decided to make money. Which one would really have interest to take your privacy? Apple? That really doesn't help them to make money. They even tried, but failed. They're really suck at making money from privacy, and it degraded reputation of their product.
If you really think Apple is selling your privacy, tell me what's the REASON. How will they make money from it rather than losing their money.
Google? See what's happening now.
Why do some people always want to tie Google with Apple? Which makes money from completely different sources. The money source defines how the company behave. If you really know that fact, you really can't say that stupid tie up.
Your life is beholden by Google, not Apple. Someday maybe Apple does that - which is very unlikely happen, but not now. And the day will come after whole existing privacy sells - such as Google - are dead, so Apple dominate whole the market.
First off: thanks for the visibility. I've been railing about this pretty much since G+ started (originally with nymwars) and Google just seems to continue not getting it. Mega thanks to David for getting this on the queue and everyone who upvoted. For something which was just a throwaway post (as I said: I was looking for one of my own earlier instances and stumbled across a whole trove), this had legs.
The HN moral: sometimes your best work is the stuff that takes little effort, thought it helps to hit the Zeitgeist wave just right.
I ... don't dislike Google, though the company's made itself vastly harder to like, and for me personally, its brand equity has been tremendously hurt by my experience to its corporate goals and motives surrounding G+, pretty much from the start. My history with the company goes back further -- I was using its search during beta in 1998/1999, and the reason was simple: it made things easier for me, and performed useful tasks, far better than anyone else at the time.
For a long time I saw Google bashing as almost entirely a Microsoft phenomenon, but I've got to say that's no longer the case. I'm absolutely no friend of Redmond's, and have watched events there over the past few months with no small amount of schadenfreude. There's no question that Microsoft continues to bash Google (sometimes effectively, often pretty cluelessly). It's very clear to me that there's a pretty solid and consistent backlash not just from techies, but as the G+ search I ran made clear, from ordinary people sick of intrusive questions.
I could wax on about privacy, and people who could be endangered or put in harm's way or find their lives ruined or what if Stalinist Nazi Cthulu buys Google... and all of that's entirely valid, but it's besides the point. Even if none of that applies, and you prefer not to have your personal data aggregated, if you say "no", the meaning is simple: "no". Stop asking. Don't go ahead and do it anyway. Don't put buttons where they're likely to get hit accidentally, or confusing dialogs, or interstitials, or anything else.
Because it's about respect.
But even if none of the factors above apply, the simple fact that I've and many, many others have made amply clear that no, we don't wish to provide this information, no, we don't wish to link our various associated identities, and no, we don't want to be part of your "identity network", means that Google (and, to be fair, a great many other companies and entities) are going OUT OF THEIR WAY TO EXPLICITLY DISRESPECT THAT PREFERENCE.
And that Google, very, very clearly, no longer respects me, or any of its users, based on far too many of its actions. Where Google used to make a decent coin offering incidental ads on top of a useful services, it's ... lost its way.
The data aggregation is one part of it. "No" means "No". It's a really simple message.
Somewhat ironically, I'd recently kicked off a G+ Community (private and invite only, sorry, I've actually transferred ownership to others as well) to discuss an anti-harassment policy following a long and detailed discussion:
https://plus.google.com/108316670838828910396/posts/9gMF3qyq...
Google's own inability to play by similar rules is ... interesting.
I'd also been reviewing some older posts, mine and other people's, as well as many of the YouTube top contributor responses (Reggie, Jonathan Paula, and others). Three points that kept getting made again and again were:
1. Google's interfaces make tons of work for users. It's sort of the anti-Perl: they make easy things hard (and tedious), and hard things impossible. Responding to YouTube comments, muting or blocking users, flagging spam, setting volume controls, managing Circles, checking on blocked / muted users, and on and on. In particular the fact that to take care of a problem here and now you've got to go somewhere else within the site to deal with it. The lack of concurrent controls is ... maddening.
2. There was no direct control over things. Google apparently are trying to handle everything "behind the scenes" through machine intelligence. And far too often doing an absolutely miserable job of it, especially where some very basic controls (dismiss post, time-out a user, comment moderation tools for posts) would help tremendously. I've seen some suggestions that earlier iterations (Wave or Buzz) are considered to have failed in part because their interfaces were too complex, but if anything G+ suffers from too few controls. And one sign of an oversimplified interface is that people start devising conventions to get around limitations. This happens on G+ in spades.
3. Noise controls. People's streams are absolutely out of control. I'd noted starting in March or thereabouts that I was finding Notifications and Search far more useful than my Stream. In a discussion of the +1 automatic share issue, Lauren Weinstein's guests similarly noted that they were using their Streams less and less:
https://plus.google.com/events/c0sddcekptbf047pb3if23rfvjc
In particular, Robert Scoble (the old noisemaker hisself) has ranted repeatedly and epicly on the lack of proper noise controls on G+, from pretty much day 1. This is from about a year in, but few of the points have been addressed:
https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853/posts/9mA8XCdu...
When I go to a site such as Hacker News or Reddit, I typically look at the front page first to see what's been selected. Because, well, it's been selected. G+ Streams and Communities don't do that. I turn to them, if at all, after going through Notifications or explicitly searching for things. I recently suggested G+ fix "What's Hot" by simply renaming it "What's Rot".
Who really nailed it for me though was Homer Slated's comment on this issue at G+ (NB: it's a touch piquant):
https://plus.google.com/102946757503830834230/posts/Mim3MwZT...
In a comment he writes, that when receiving a Notification from Google:
[W]hat Google is doing is, essentially, telling me that it's found a word in the dictionary that I might be interested in, that it's seven letters long and contains the letter "g", but rather than just telling me what the word is, or even linking directly to it, it simply links me to a dictionary, then expects me to spend hours trawling through that dictionary just to finds that word....
It helps to understand that Google is not a search company, or a social networking outfit, or an email provider ... it's an advertising company, and therefore everything it does is oriented toward the principle of "promotion"....
While I have no doubt that Google has highly sophisticated search algorithms working behind the scenes, the results that you and I are actually presented with, and the mechanisms for obtaining those results, are skewed toward "buzz", not accuracy or relevance.
In other words, if Google were a news organisation, it wouldn't be reporting the news, it would be fabricating it, then tailoring that work of fiction to appeal to (what it believes is) your "general" interests.
If there was a single word that could concisely sum up Google, it would be "vague". Google is deliberately vague, it's notifications are vague, the way it handles articles and comments is vague, its search results are vague ... and by no accident. Google is deliberately vague because it wants to steer you away from what's actually relevant to you, and what actually interests you, to those things it wants you to become interested in.
In a G+ post I discussed lies. The common one is the lie of commission: I tell you something that's not true, a fabrication. Another, slightly more nuanced, is the lie of omission -- neglecting to inform you of a material fact. You'll find it especially referenced in business contracts, particularly real-estate and M&A concerning adverse conditions. A third type is what I've called a "lie of diversion". It's generally not a truth or a non-truth itself, but its purpose is to obscure truth, meaning, and relevance. It's at the heart of much of what's wrong (IMO) with "viral media" and messages -- little non-facts floating around in little non-informational nuggets, clogging up your cognitive circuits. And processing all that non-information takes a lot of effort.
https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/5zrCkbzR...
The biggest problem with G+ I was consistently running into was simply the non-relevance of what it was presenting me. And that's a change fundamentally due, I suspect, to its reliance on advertising and the culture this brings.
Google thought it could ride the advertising tiger when it opted to go that way early in its career. And for a time it did. But in a long and storied career of riding tigers, I've learned two things: ultimately the tiger is in control, and dismounting is the hardest part.
The lack of respect is why I feel that Google's corporate culture is fundamentally broken. Whether it's a rotten core or a rotten head I don't know. I absolutely don't question that there are some very well-meaning people working for Google, especially within the engineering staff. Possibly high on the org chart. But enough people, in enough positions of power, and I strongly suspect Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, and Vic Gundotra as being part of that group, either don't get it, are actively pursuing personal data aggregation, or, and this actually frightens me more: have been persuaded that it's in their best interest to follow this path via a deal they cannot refuse.
Frankly, none of those possibilities does much to give me any level of faith in the company. Or in any centrally-organized personal data-gathering effort.
And Facebook does same thing doesn't justify anything. It just means they're same. Also Facebook has a lot better configurable personal policy.
Anyway, that's awesome finally we have two options. If we can make them compete, we will get the service in cheaper price - with less personal information. Currently Facebook looks obvious winner in this field, because users don't even realize they're offering stuffs to Facebook, and Google has big resist.
And stop asking if I want to download the youtube app every time I go to youtube.com in mobile safari (It is the pop-up banner of this generation.) That goes for all you clever scripting savvy marketers, I fucking despise you.
That was the only choice in the whole page. I have to close the browser session and come back again. I really dont know what to do. Got sucked in. there is no way around. Soon i will get the courage to move out.
I know the following will not win me too many friends, but there is a way to around this, and that is to stop using their products. They are a commercial entity and making money for the company and shareholders is one of their "prime objectives". Due to that, unfortunately they have to push into areas which generate revenue for them.
The services are not free, you pay for them with your compliance and personal information.
I don't know but that sounds pretty fair to me.