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We Need To Talk, Google

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Re: We Need To Talk, Google

#201

Post by makomk »

VikingCoder wrote: post #119
v13inc wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, that's hard to say without doing proper usability testing. I managed to find a decent looking study that somewhat supports my position [1]. Here's an interesting quote from the abstract: "many (40%) were hesitant to consent to the release of their personal profile information; and (6) many (36%) ex- pressed concern with the use of SSO on websites that contain valuable personal information or, conversel…

Many (40%) were hesitant to use Facebook, when it was described to them, citing privacy concerns. And then 98% of them did. How people say they will act, and how they act, are completely different animals.

That probably has a lot to do with network effects - even if a lot of people would be hesitant to use Facebook, all their friends are on there rather than a more privacy-preserving alternative. Same reason everyone keeps using eBay even though they continue to get shitter and shitter.

Re: We Need To Talk, Google

#202

Post by bowlofpetunias »

radnom wrote: post #166
bowlofpetunias wrote: post #45

This is just one of the many issues with Google products these days. I dread using anything from Google because of the confusing accounts mess, the language and localization chaos, the forced de-anonimization, the consistent ignoring of explicitly set preferences and the countless bugs in all of those. The way I feel about using Google services today mirrors how I felt about Windows a decade ago. You start out trying…

Pretty sure that performing a google search is just as easy today as it ever was.

No it isn't.

For starters, I regularly have to first convince Google that I don't want to do just a local search in my country or my language. Simply setting my preferences (which are hard to find and confusing) once won't do it.

If I do happen to go along with Google's insistence in making my world a smaller place, I get confronted not having my options at the usual place, or under the usual labels (Google still can't keep interface language and local search apart), or worse: features that are missing completely.

Try to find something that has to do with software development but that happens to contain one keyword that also has meaning in the local language on a localized version of Google. It's a fucking joke. Gets even worse if Google assumes you misspelled the technical term in question.

Re: We Need To Talk, Google

#203

Post by makomk »

cbhl wrote: post #195
nolok wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to add that while I disagree with the comment you're replying to (reminds me of "why disagree with spying if you have nothing to hide" ...), I understand that nothing forces a particular company to allow anonymous content on their website and that's fine by me. But there is a world between refusing anon, and suddenly and posteriorly displaying the real name of people on top of content they thought was an…

You shouldn't rely on Mother Google or Daddy Facebook to fight your battles for you, because their interests are not the same as yours. Real Names was protested to death the moment that Google+ came out; my understanding is that their compromise was that your entire Google profile was to use the same name, but that name could be a pseudonym so long as it was realistic. (If your legal name was weird, well, too bad, se…

There's a huge amount of social pressure against being so paranoid about whether Google or Facebook might hypothetically decide to do something bad in the future. Saying that people should stop whining about it once it actually happens is effectively equivalent to saying that no-one should complain about it at all.

Re: We Need To Talk, Google

#204

Post by V-2 »

This is really irritating. I use a nickname on YouTube and they keep on asking me whether I want to switch to my real name (I do not) like I do on Gmail... There is no way to permanently refuse that nice offer, so it keeps coming up, presumably in hope that one day I'll finally misclick and after that, the case will settle. I tried Google Plus for a while too, but I deleted the profile because they were so shoving it down my throat.

Re: We Need To Talk, Google

#205

Post by Grue3 »

cromwellian wrote: post #49

Google is simply trying to unify their services. YouTube was an acquisition, with it's own login system and social network. They don't want to maintain this separation forever, they want a single signon for everything. Ditto for sharing and contacts. You had separate 'contacts' in Gmail, Latitude, G+, Reader, YouTube, and probably others I'm missing. Users shouldn't be prompted to maintain N different copies of this…

But everything worked just fine before, I had a single Google account, a single Youtube channel and a single G+ page, and signing into either of these would sign me into everything else. After Google decided to "unify" Youtube and G+ accounts, I now have 1 Google account, 2 Youtube channels and 2 G+ pages , and that's not counting an extra Youtube channel I created, which accounts for 1 extra Google account and 1 extra G+ page. I have more goddamn accounts than ever before, and it's a total pain to switch Youtube to the correct one. How is this unification?

Re: We Need To Talk, Google

#206

Post by BrandonM »

cromwellian wrote: post #49

Google is simply trying to unify their services. YouTube was an acquisition, with it's own login system and social network. They don't want to maintain this separation forever, they want a single signon for everything. Ditto for sharing and contacts. You had separate 'contacts' in Gmail, Latitude, G+, Reader, YouTube, and probably others I'm missing. Users shouldn't be prompted to maintain N different copies of this…

Except where it doesn't. I have a Google+ account. I also have a separate work email that uses a Google Apps account.

Without my prompting, and after already indicating that I didn't want a Google+ account for my work account, Google displayed a distracting notification that I should add people to my (work) Google+ account, the account that I didn't create and definitely didn't want.

Sometimes I don't want to use any of those five other services. And if I happen to watch some YouTube videos at work from time to time, I don't really want those to be associated with my Google Apps work account.

So no, it is not a mistake to view it as Google forcing me to use social features that I don't want; that's exactly what it is!

Re: We Need To Talk, Google

#207

Post by jakobe »

radnom wrote: post #166
bowlofpetunias wrote: post #45

This is just one of the many issues with Google products these days. I dread using anything from Google because of the confusing accounts mess, the language and localization chaos, the forced de-anonimization, the consistent ignoring of explicitly set preferences and the countless bugs in all of those. The way I feel about using Google services today mirrors how I felt about Windows a decade ago. You start out trying…

Pretty sure that performing a google search is just as easy today as it ever was.

Not really. Google's autocorrect regularly 'corrects' my search term to something else. Or Google suggests a similar search, where by "similar" they mean "the same search but with the most important term missing".

Sometimes Google instant stops working and I can't search anymore. I have to reload the page before I can enter new search terms.

Google used to be so simple, predictable, and it always worked. Now it is a complex, intransparent mess.

Google Search is becoming more and more like Altavista and Yahoo were like when Google started.

Re: We Need To Talk, Google

#208

Post by vjvj »

My sentiments exactly. I don't want to have my full name displayed on a social network. But once I change it on G+ it also changes on the emails I send.

Bye Google.

Re: We Need To Talk, Google

#209

Post by andygates »

drill_sarge wrote: post #21
lawdawg wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is a UX problem, not a "Google attempting to drive me into yet another unwanted "social" network". You don't think it's in Google's best interest that channels create Google+ Pages rather than individual Google+ profiles?

It is in Googles interest to have as many G+ profiles (aka potential userbase) as possible.

But they want each one to be tied to a single physical person. They actively dislike alts, which makes having a home profile and a work profile and $counterculture_of_choice profile or two awkward and annoying.

Re: We Need To Talk, Google

#210

Post by dredmorbius »

jerf wrote: post #179
dredmorbius wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That anonymous account knows where you live, who you talk to, where you go, what you read online, ... Linking it to your legal identity isn't hard. Data show that just two ZIP Codes (in the US) can indentify an individual with 95% accuracy: your home and workplace. Makes me want to rightgrade to an uncontracted dumbphone and a custom-ROMed tablet. Not linked to any Google accounts.

Yeah, but that's mostly useful to law enforcement, if they were interested, and for that the mere fact of a cell phone is enough to get everything you mentioned. What Google gets of value out of this account is greatly reduced, especially as I've been buying the ad-free version of the apps. (While in theory Google could get everything you say, I believe that in practice they actually do not, say, forward all of your…

Yeah, but that's mostly useful to law enforcement, if they were interested

De-anonymization has been studied and applied by various parties, and I'm personally aware of at least one non-LEO application. I don't know that Google does or doesn't do this, though it wouldn't surprise me at all if marketing/advertising and/or other "personalization" services did. It would annoy me intensely to find that they were.

For that the mere fact of a cell phone is enough to get everything you mentioned.

A dumb phone can only report coarse location information, SMS messaging, and calls data. Frequently expiring SIMs would limit the useful duration of much of that information, though you'd need something like a self-hosted Google Voice forwarding service to be able to use the phone usefully while maintaining reasonable anonymity. It's not currently practical for most purposes.

Relying on a Free Software VOIP service based on the tablet preferentially for voice calls would further reduce exposure.

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