81–90 of 261 posts
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Never forget that you are not the customer, you are the product.
That's just silly, Google can't afford to alienate its users, whether you consider them customers or products. This phrase is becoming a meme.
The whole phone number thing is an attempt to solve a very hard problem. 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…
You totally miss the point. Its not about how great two factor authentication is. Its about the fact I don't want to use the two factor authentication, I'd rather loose everything. 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 s…
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.
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I think I might hit 10k emails a month if I subscribe for a few more mailing lists, though I guess I could stand to unsub from a few. Otherwise I think that's a pretty decent solution.
The limit is for outgoing mail so unless your sending 10,000 emails a month to mailing lists, I don't think you'll have a problem.
I was all enthusiastic about G+ for about 5 minutes - until they wouldn't allow my wife to sign up without giving them her phone number, and proving that it was hers by accepting a call from them . Just who the fuck do they think they are?? 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…
> Just who the fuck do they think they are?? 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 yo…
Is there a browser plugin or something that can keep google in check? Like separating youtube, gmail and the search into different "sandboxes"? Maybe blocking some of the annoying popups that constantly demand your info? I'm not familiar with such a thing, but it could be kinda nice to have it.
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.
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That's just silly, Google can't afford to alienate its users, whether you consider them customers or products. This phrase is becoming a meme.
Yes, it can. Where exactly are they going to go? Even the really few of us who care about it enough to stop using Google search , turning to duckduckgo, still need to go back to Google every once in a while, when DDG obviously doesn't cut it. The interwebs are filled with Google's advertising products, and the number of Gmail users who evangelically try to beat its interface into behaving well enough to be worth a fu…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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'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 transact…
> 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.
I was all enthusiastic about G+ for about 5 minutes - until they wouldn't allow my wife to sign up without giving them her phone number, and proving that it was hers by accepting a call from them . Just who the fuck do they think they are?? 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…
> Just who the fuck do they think they are?? 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 yo…
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.
Does Google believe that if they just push a little harder and finish the job, that somehow the people so alienated will be won over? 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.
I have no idea why people talk about huge corporations like they have hive mind and are in total unity? 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.…
I was all enthusiastic about G+ for about 5 minutes - until they wouldn't allow my wife to sign up without giving them her phone number, and proving that it was hers by accepting a call from them . Just who the fuck do they think they are?? 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…
One of the leading services targeted by account generation farms to launch spam.