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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
by blumkvist 13y ago
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.
- ritikk2 13y agoExcept 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.
- blueskin_ 13y agoNice 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?
- ritikk2 13y agoThat is not the same thing. An ad targeting secret profile is different form a public G+ profile.
- dredmorbius 13y agoSo you're not denying the Google employee charge?
- TeMPOraL 13y agoMaybe he's ignoring it, because it is stupid and irrelevant?
- girvo 13y agoJesus. Bring on the witch hunt...
- dredmorbius 13y agoSome of us have long memories of astroturfing and don't much care for it. https://web.archive.org/web/20000118072436/http://lists.essential.org/1998/am-info/msg01529.html https://web.archive.org/web/20000118072436/http://lists.esse...
- girvo 13y agoThat... 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.
- Casseres 13y agoGoogle created my G+ account automatically. I removed everything from it, but it is not "only created by you".
- ritikk3 13y agoNo 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.
- blumkvist 13y agoYes, that's what we are talking about. Google forces you to create a G+ account via dark patterns. It's using the market share of its products to push a privacy breaching service.
- blueskin_ 13y agoActually, 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.
- Casseres 13y agoNo 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.
- aaronem 13y ago> 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.
- blumkvist 13y agocreated 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.
- ritikk3 13y agoYes I've created an account to be able to participate in this discussion, and incremented the username by 1 as it gets rate limited. But your statement is false, I have 2 Google accounts one with G+ the other without, and I use gmail, drive etc on both.
- dredmorbius 13y agoWhy are you creating two accounts to respond to this thread?
- blueskin_ 13y agoBecause I suspect he's a google shill.
- gnur 13y agoThis 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.