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Thanks to Quora, now you can’t read anonymously

gigaom.com

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Re: Thanks to Quora, now you can’t read anonymously

#41

Post by vlasta2 »

I do not have a Quora account, but I understand their move and it may not be all bad. There are 3 ways how a company may handle user passive privacy:

1. Not collect any information (in this case who read what article) at all. Obviously that company would be at a big disadvantage, having no access to a useful set of signals.

2. Collect the information and use it for their own goals.

3. Collect the information and make it freely available.

If I understand the article correctly, Quora went from strategy #2 to #3. From my perspective, this is a positive move. In case #3, users are aware of what is happening with their private information and may log out if they do not want to be tracked this way. It is way better than living in peaceful ignorance as in case #2. Also, the company cannot sell the private info, because it is publicly available.

Re: Thanks to Quora, now you can’t read anonymously

#42

Post by lifeinafolder »

samstave wrote: post #9

Quora is in the same boat as FB (and to a certain extent, Twitter) They think that the experience of their largely 20-something staff is anything short of revolutionary. A bunch of kids running a digital media company with questionable morals and no connection to digital history. I will delete me Quora account. So far I have gotten little value from it. Time for it to have no data on me. Deactivated! Edit: I followed…

ditto. I emailed privacy@quora.com to delete my account. Waiting for a response from them now.

Re: Thanks to Quora, now you can’t read anonymously

#43

Post by 0x0 »

irahul wrote: post #37
0x0 wrote: post #16

Quora has gone the way of expert-sexchange, showing up in Google search results for interesting questions, but then overlaying/replacing most answers with blur and "sign up to read". Borderline SERP cloaking, to say the least.

> Quora has gone the way of expert-sexchange, showing up in Google search results for interesting questions, but then overlaying/replacing most answers with blur and "sign up to read". This shit doesn't fly with Google. Delivering different content to Google bot and the user coming through search makes Google looks like a fool, since the user is unable to find the content he searched for. That is why expert-sexchange…

It looks like what they are doing are obfuscating with CSS.

See for example: http://www.quora.com/Bayesian-Inference/How-do-Bayesian-algo...

The answers are in a span with class "blurred_answer", which has css styles: "color: transparent; text-shadow: 0 0 7px #777". Which in effect makes the text completely unreadable to humans.

This is just one step above "color: #fff; background-color: #fff".

Scummy.

Re: Thanks to Quora, now you can’t read anonymously

#44

Post by cantrevealname »

monsterix wrote: post #21
samstave wrote: post #9

Quora is in the same boat as FB (and to a certain extent, Twitter) They think that the experience of their largely 20-something staff is anything short of revolutionary. A bunch of kids running a digital media company with questionable morals and no connection to digital history. I will delete me Quora account. So far I have gotten little value from it. Time for it to have no data on me. Deactivated! Edit: I followed…

Absolutely. Their policy to force your true_full_name is an absolute no-go for many users. A friend of mine from south India has a very lengthy name. Few parts of his name are direct reference to his ancestors and the villages they come from. Sort of like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._D._Deve_Gowda where H. D. parts of his name are references to ancestry, places etc. My friend was denied permission to use Quo…

My friend was denied permission to use Quora for not revealing his ancestor name.

Could you explain how it happened in this specific case, since it sounds like the name that your friend gave appeared to be real. That it, it wasn't something like "Fake Name" or "Bite Me", so how did Quora know?

And, in general, could someone explain how the likes of Quora and Facebook decide that a name isn't "real"? Does someone at Quora or Facebook manually scan new account names? Do they wait for complaints from other users? Is it something algorithmic like noting that you receive messages such as "Hi Mike" but where you registered as "Fred Flintstone"?

Re: Thanks to Quora, now you can’t read anonymously

#45

Post by unimpressive »

vlasta2 wrote: post #41

I do not have a Quora account, but I understand their move and it may not be all bad. There are 3 ways how a company may handle user passive privacy: 1. Not collect any information (in this case who read what article) at all. Obviously that company would be at a big disadvantage, having no access to a useful set of signals. 2. Collect the information and use it for their own goals. 3. Collect the information and make…

> Also, the company cannot sell the private info, because it is publicly available.

Uh. Maybe you don't understand why people don't like it when companies sell their data.

It's because it ends up in the hands of every shady marketing agency and intelligence organization on earth. Making it public just means that these parties can get it with no barrier to entry.

See: Usenet, where any email address that's ever touched it is supposedly under constant siege by spam.

Re: Thanks to Quora, now you can’t read anonymously

#46

Post by vog »

samstave wrote: post #40
unimpressive wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget /etc/hosts: 127.0.0.1 quora.com www.quora.com

While I see that - its not that I dont want to be able to access them it is more that I want all data associated to me to be deleted...

As far as I understand it, this /etc/hosts entry is not so much about you accessing Quora, but more about other sites that want your browser to connect to Quora (e.g. via embedded content or JavaScript).

Re: Thanks to Quora, now you can’t read anonymously

#47

Post by rblackwater »

unimpressive wrote: post #39
samstave wrote: post #9

Quora is in the same boat as FB (and to a certain extent, Twitter) They think that the experience of their largely 20-something staff is anything short of revolutionary. A bunch of kids running a digital media company with questionable morals and no connection to digital history. I will delete me Quora account. So far I have gotten little value from it. Time for it to have no data on me. Deactivated! Edit: I followed…

Don't forget /etc/hosts: 127.0.0.1 quora.com www.quora.com

That's not really necessary, after you delete your account they'll block you from reading by themselves.

Re: Thanks to Quora, now you can’t read anonymously

#48

Post by mtgx »

tijs wrote: post #30
samstave wrote: post #9

Quora is in the same boat as FB (and to a certain extent, Twitter) They think that the experience of their largely 20-something staff is anything short of revolutionary. A bunch of kids running a digital media company with questionable morals and no connection to digital history. I will delete me Quora account. So far I have gotten little value from it. Time for it to have no data on me. Deactivated! Edit: I followed…

apparently you have to e-mail privacy@quora.com to get your account deleted completely. That in itself is reason to delete your account btw. It speaks volumes of their regard for users and their privacy.

Wow. I'm certainly asking for a deletion now, too. I haven't used it in a while, but I hate these tactics of not allowing the user to delete the account when he wants to.

Re: Thanks to Quora, now you can’t read anonymously

#49

Post by sdqali »

tijs wrote: post #30
samstave wrote: post #9

Quora is in the same boat as FB (and to a certain extent, Twitter) They think that the experience of their largely 20-something staff is anything short of revolutionary. A bunch of kids running a digital media company with questionable morals and no connection to digital history. I will delete me Quora account. So far I have gotten little value from it. Time for it to have no data on me. Deactivated! Edit: I followed…

apparently you have to e-mail privacy@quora.com to get your account deleted completely. That in itself is reason to delete your account btw. It speaks volumes of their regard for users and their privacy.

Thanks for the correct email id. I just sent out a mail asking them to delete my account.

Re: Thanks to Quora, now you can’t read anonymously

#50

Post by savramescu »

pooriaazimi wrote: post #29

This is stupid. What's more stupid is their desperation for you to interact with their site. I went to remove my unused account, and this is what I got when I typed www.quora.com: http://d.pr/i/WcMl You'll notice that I couldn't do anything else - I "had" to choose 5 extremely broad subjects that I'm supposed to be interested in, in order to be able to view my profile. I selected 5 subjects randomly, and... http://d.…

If you don't email privacy@quora.com it won't get deleted though. Make sure you do that as well.
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