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I remember trying Hackpad when it first popped up here on HN. I signed in with my Google account and was surprised to find that it had pulled a photo of me to u
by mintplant 12y ago
I remember trying Hackpad when it first popped up here on HN. I signed in with my Google account and was surprised to find that it had pulled a photo of me to use as my avatar—a photo that I had never knowingly put online. Nothing bad, just a Christmas photo, but it was personal and not meant to be plastered on the web. Being privacy-conscious, I had always tried to keep photos of me off of the internet.
At this time there wasn't any way to change your profile picture through the web interface. I tried to get in touch but never received any replies. My face was stuck there on my profile, and there was nothing I could do about it.
Just checked and the picture was still there. There's a "Change profile picture" link now, but it seems to be broken: uploading a new picture does nothing. At least you can delete your account now, which I've done.
Hackpad is a great tool, and I wish them the best with the open source release, but this is the experience that has stuck in my mind. Don't pull photos from people's accounts without asking for permission, especially not for public display.
(I'm still not sure where the photo came from, as I could never find it on my Google account. I suspect some misconfigured Windows Phone privacy / contact syncing setting was the culprit.)
- drummer32 12y agogravatar?
- mintplant 12y agoNo, not Gravatar. I had a different, non-photo avatar set up for my email address.
- Sir_Substance 12y agoNot to be a cracked record, or anything, but this is why I don't use cloud services. What else is hanging around on profiles you don't know about and didn't ask for? You don't know! It's all hidden in ~the cloud~ where you can't see it or do anything about it. The answer is not to have a go at the hackpad guys, it's to not centralise everything on google.
- mintplant 12y agoWell, yeah, I never even asked (intentionally) for this photo to be sent to Google in the first place. Like you say, I don't store this stuff on "the cloud". So Windows Phone holds the blame for that.
- krisdol 12y agoFor myself and my peers it was our gravatar.