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Besides not addressing the points that EFF raised, one of my serious problems with Google Apps (as a user) is data leakage across services and accounts. Some e
by danieldk 11y ago
Besides not addressing the points that EFF raised, one of my serious problems with Google Apps (as a user) is data leakage across services and accounts.
Some examples:
- Google Hangouts is one of the covered apps. But to be actually useful (e.g. if you want to share images), you had to turn on Google+. Images end up in Google+ photo albums, which are not covered by the Google Apps agreement and the data can be mined for advertising purposes.
- Google Drive is also covered, which means that data on Drive is not mined for ads. However, in a realistic work environment, you have to share files outside your organisation. If you share a file and someone ends up opening it on a non-Apps Google account, your document has been leaked to an ad-mined Drive account.
- When Google Photos was introduced, suddenly all my Drive photos were there as well. Google Photos is not covered, which means that the photos can be mined for ads. Luckily, this problem seems to have been resolved.
- Google Mail is covered by the terms of apps. But if I go to Google Plus, people I communicated with via e-mail are suggested as circle additions. Since Google Plus is not covered by the Apps terms, why does data from e-mail end up there?
My impression is that (perhaps driven by the consumer apps) data isolation is a real problem within Google and there is a certain amount of data shared between apps that are covered by the Google Apps terms and those that aren't. This seriously undermines my trust in Google Apps and its suitability for business/education.
Of course, I could switch off every Google service in Apps outside what is covered. But then you need two Google accounts, which is really inconvenient.
- profeta 11y agoI am one of the suckers that try to live with two google accounts. It is maddening. For example, if you do not agree to g+ on your main account and by mistake you select that account on the dropdown from hangouts or the play store* then you get the EULA agreement and there is no way to go back to the app and select another account if you don't agree. Because as soon as you decline you exit the app, and opening the app again will how the aggrement for the last selected account, if you having another account already green lighted. The workaround? remove one account. clear data on that app, and redo everything. * there is no way to NOT show the main (undesired) account on the drop down, and you have to use the dropdown a lot on hangouts as SMS is another account! so every time i move from sms to wifi calls, i have 1 in 2 chances of screwing everything, even more so as my profile pic on my main account is not shown because i never agreed to some policy that would allow it
- fixermark 11y agoI find that using Chrome with the multiple accounts feature helps a great deal. You can theme the different Chrome accounts differently to provide a visual hint when you're in the wrong window. And if you consistently log into only one web account from each Chrome account, you never get the multiple-login selector.
- profeta 11y agoyeah, that is easy. i also do that with firefox. i have one themed using a proxy to work, the other not. i was mostly talking about android apps, where there is hardly an alternative for google services.
- dozzie 11y agoAnd why exactly are you supprised that services designed to be integrated deeply with one another are integrated with one another? Integration pretty much guarantees that data will leak between them. This is one of the main reasons why I don't use Google services, except for their search engine.
- cmcnally 11y agoHave you tried DuckDuckGo? With the exception of maps and directions, I actually prefer their search experience to Google's.
- dozzie 11y agoI do use it on handhelds (my browser of choice happened to change its default search engine to Bing, which I dislike and distrust, and used to crash on Google). It feels a little too off in its search results for my usual desktop work.
- krisdol 11y agoIt's been my home page for years. Originally i would still often go directly to google for better results, but each year the amount of times I'd do that decreased. Now I'm actually really happy with DDG results, and when I do perform the same search on Google, it ends up being less accurate. I think this is because Google has such a huge belief that personalization yields accuracy, but it doesn't. Past trends don't always predict future patterns. Google gimped their search engine in my totally honest opinion. It's completely useless until I filter for "Verbatim Search", because they keep guessing at synonyms for my search terms and randomly leaving out terms their algorithm thinks aren't important to me. Google.com is such a downright horrible experience for me, a once wonderful gateway that is now just a necessary evil at best.
- fixermark 11y agoIt turns out that protecting one's privacy in the digital age is really inconvenient. It was before the digital age too ("What do you mean your phone number isn't in the phone book?"), but people are more aware of it now.