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Comment by blumkvist | Hacker News Reader

Google creates a real identity for you, without you explicitly asking them to, based on the information they already have about you, like your interests(google now), gmail account (and its contents!!!), youtube, blogger, author profile, G maps, waze, android (photos, who you call, who calls you) GPS (where you go, with whom, how much you stay there), your friends, coleagues, acquaintances and possibly indexed 3rd party web pages. And they buried what they are doing and the privacy controls through dark patterns, so most of the people aren't even aware of that.

Not only they are forcing the majority of the internet population to have an account pulling information from different parts of their lives, they are forcing them to use that account publicly and start identifying with it - youtube, sms, email, blogger (soon waze?).

Tell me how dystopian this is? Now consider that the same company knows all the sites you visit and how you got there.

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This isn't true for your public profile. Whatever you share on google+ is what you, youself, put on it. It doesn't share the sex they can deduce you have, it shares the sex you entered yourself. Same with the name and everything else.

Except that isn’t true! your G+ account is only created by you and only shows what you want it to.

That is just another one of the inaccuracies in that post that are stated as fact.

Nice try, google employee.

Even if people don't have a google+ account (even if they don't have a gmail account), do you really think google aren't building a profile with as much personal data as they can collect?

That is not the same thing. An ad targeting secret profile is different form a public G+ profile.

So you're not denying the Google employee charge?

Maybe he's ignoring it, because it is stupid and irrelevant?

Jesus. Bring on the witch hunt...

Some of us have long memories of astroturfing and don't much care for it.

https://web.archive.org/web/20000118072436/http://lists.esse...

That... is not what we're talking about.

With all respect, I don't use Googles services anymore myself, but your posts in this thread have been as... partisan, for lack of a better term, as the person you claim is a "Google employee". You're just on different sides of that.

I never claimed or pretended to be neutral.

Well screaming like a (anti)fanboy doesn't fit in with HN's discourse, and will make the majority of people dismiss what you have to say. That's as shame, as I actually agree with you on this topic somewhat.

Google created my G+ account automatically. I removed everything from it, but it is not "only created by you".

No it didn't, it might have been created when you joined something that required it and there was a check mark somewhere, it gets populated by stuff that you added when you started Google account like date of birth etc, but you get presented with that as well.

I doesn’t just get created on its own.

Actually, when I created a disposable gmail account a couple of years ago, it came with google plus already active. I deleted that part, of course, but I never signed up for it.

No checkboxes and no options that I ever saw.

I'm the kind of person that explores all menu options and such in software to make sure it doesn't run/install anything I don't want. When signing up for services online, I go through all the settings. I even occasionally go through my Gmail settings to make sure nothing has changed.

Maybe it was "designed" to give me an option, but I never had an option. Gmail isn't bug-free either. Over the years I've run into a few bugs. Occasionally the link for the inbox shows I have unread mail, but there is none. I'm able to fix it by doing a search for unread mail, and the link changes showing that I don't have any unread mail.

> I even occasionally go through my Gmail settings to make sure nothing has changed.

Yeesh. It's stuff like this that makes me glad I run my own mail/CalDAV/CardDAV server, and am thus free to use throwaway accounts for all of my interaction with Google.

I wonder if there'd be any interest in an old-fashioned HOWTO that starts with a freshly imaged VPS and goes through the whole setup process. It's been a few years since I set everything up, but I've been planning to redo it on a fresh box anyway, and writing the HOWTO wouldn't add much effort.

I think that's a good idea. I know I'll be looking for some examples in a couple of months when I have enough time to dedicate setting one up properly.

You may or may not have seen it already, but in case you haven't, I'll link here the "How to NSA-proof your email" howto [1] someone just posted in the "Gmail was down" thread. Regardless of how you feel about the Black Chamber, it's an excellently well-written document on setting up your own mail-serving VPS using postfix and dovecot; the filesystem-level encryption stuff is trivially severable, and constitutes about 80% of what I'd have written (but not as well) had I not found this first. The other 20% would be setting up Baïkal for CalDAV/CardDAV service, but that's pretty straightforward and well described in the Baïkal Github repo.

(Minor quibbles about the HOWTO: I'm not sure Solr is really necessary; Dovecot seems to give me full-text search for free via IMAP. Also, I tried Z-push and it worked, but didn't support message flags, which I require, and I got tired of push pretty fast anyway. It works, and might've added message flags in the years since I tried it, but it's by no means required. Still, an excellent document, which I unreservedly recommend.)

[1] http://sealedabstract.com/code/nsa-proof-your-e-mail-in-2-ho...

I love the implication that having something auto-opt you into something and then doing it is the same thing as voluntarily doing it. Like we're supposed to be ok with the companies we do business with behaving like evil genies.

created 15 minutes ago

But to answer you, so the casual reader does not get confused, you get a Google+ account when you use gmail or youtube or pretty much any other google service.

Why are you creating two accounts to respond to this thread?

Because I suspect he's a google shill.

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