is this really new?
|
| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| mbaehrlxer Feb 28, 2012 2:07 AM EDT |
i was under the impression that the new policy didn't really change anything, just streamline the rules to make them the same for all services. that means linking user data across email, video, social-networking and other google services is not new, but has already been done before. and i would not be surprised by that. if i use the same account for gmail, gcode and youtube, how can google not link my user data across those? i am not defending google here. i never signed up for gmail to begin with, but unfortunately it can't be avoided to sign up got google code or groups if i want to participate in a project that has chosen to use google for its tools. however i try to keep the accounts separate. that is, i use a different account for each service that i use. for the rest i am working on my own alternatives. greetings, eMBee. |
| Ridcully Feb 28, 2012 3:06 AM EDT |
@mbaehrlxer....I really don't know. I had heard the policy was "changing". What I do know is that although I have a GMail account, I rarely if ever use it. Given the calibre of Sam Varghese though, I'd tend to accept his argument was probably valid. The only reason I keep that GMail account open is that there are some long lost contacts for whom that account is the only way they have of contacting me. I check it once a month for incoming mail, but apart from that, never use it........and won't. If Google can find a way of reading my likes and dislikes and fire adverts onto me over non-use, good luck.....Possibly adverts for white out ? Update 5 minutes later....just for interest, I logged into my account a minute ago, found an unsolicited email from Google about trying to get me into their version of Facebook with names of other people who I might like to include and took the decision.....I no longer have a GMail account. I do not like the starting mode of what can only be called, as far as I am concerned, privacy invasion. |
| mbaehrlxer Feb 28, 2012 3:28 AM EDT |
oh, his argument and his reaction is certainly valid. i am also not faulting him for not making the move earlier, or even for believing that this is a new thing. i am merely asking if it really is a new thing because i don't think it is. greetings, eMBee. |
| ComputerBob Feb 28, 2012 9:24 AM EDT |
Quoting:however i try to keep the accounts separate. that is, i use a different account for each service that i use.It wouldn't surprise me if Google uses the cookies from each of your separate accounts to tie them all together in its database. |
| Bob_Robertson Feb 28, 2012 10:15 AM EDT |
I'm a little bit surprised that anyone believes their email to be private at all. The entire process of "store and forward" means there could be copies of an email in a dozen places by the time your target receives it. When I want to send a private message, I use GPG/PGP. Like y'all, I would never fault someone who chooses not to use Gmail, or Google for that matter. Only that the declaration of invasion of privacy should be tempered with knowledge of when privacy is real in the first place. |
| ComputerBob Feb 28, 2012 10:26 AM EDT |
Quoting:...the declaration of invasion of privacy should be tempered with knowledge of when privacy is real in the first place.Agreed, but with the stipulation that there's a big difference between using an email account that is theoretically insecure, due to the way in which it is transmitted, and using an email account that is actively mined for personal and private data by the email provider. |
| Bob_Robertson Feb 28, 2012 10:30 AM EDT |
CompBob, I agree. It certainly is different, but Google has been doing this since day 1. |
| ComputerBob Feb 28, 2012 11:11 AM EDT |
@BR - Though not quite as encompassing in the past as it plans to be in the future. |
| Bob_Robertson Feb 28, 2012 11:40 AM EDT |
Could be. Could also be they just haven't told anyone before. My personal opinion: I don't mind if a company tracks that 'customer 1234' buys the following, at the following times, these items together, searches for pictures of beautiful japanese women every few weeks, etc. So store cards by themselves don't bother me, and I know being able to correlate such buying patterns helps them stock their shelves better to match their customer's wants. What bothers me is when such information is linked to personal information, so that they know "customer 1234" is Bob Robertson, who lives here, whose telephone number and credit card are thus, etc. And sharing that between companies (and the Feds) bothers me most of all. The American Library Association are heroes. When faced with the abominable laws that require them to give away a library user's reading history, they re-wrote their software to keep NO HISTORY. Return a book, the record is ERASED. Make me proud to have dated a librarian. They deserve accolade. |
| ComputerBob Feb 28, 2012 12:23 PM EDT |
One of the major local grocery stores here offers a discount card to its customers - you get a significant discount on your purchases if you use the card, which allows them to track every purchase you make and match it to the detailed personal information (including yearly income) that you provided when you registered for the card. The loophole is that -- if you appear at a checkout line without a discount card -- they remove a brand new discount card from a new registration form and scan it, to give you the discount, and then hand you the registration form and ask you to fill it out and bring it back the next time you shop. At least that's what they've done for me every time I've shopped there. (I have a stack of their discount cards). |
| Steven_Rosenber Feb 28, 2012 12:38 PM EDT |
So the only way to have truly secure e-mail, end to end, is with GPG? I use Thunderbird, and Enigmail can help make this happen: http://enigmail.mozdev.org/home/index.php.html It's even packaged for Debian: http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/enigmail More on GnuPG from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Privacy_Guard I'd still like to find a good explanation for mortals on how GPG is used. |
| vainrveenr Feb 28, 2012 12:41 PM EDT |
Quoting:Agreed, but with the stipulation that there's a big difference between using an email account that is theoretically insecure, due to the way in which it is transmitted, and using an email account that is actively mined for personal and private data by the email provider. Until the end of the last year, there was the notorious Scroogle Scraper, which provided Google Search results through a proxy to help limit this very mining for personal and private data, even through the mere act of browsing. See last week's 'Scroogle Founder Pulls The Plug, Closes Website' found at http://www.ghacks.net/2012/02/22/scroogle-founder-pulls-the-plug-closes-website/. Google quite effectively took Scroogle down with all the means at its disposal. Specifically for FF/IW versions below 9.x there is an anonymizing proxy service for Google's services called GoogleSharing The primary GoogleSharing webpage asks the very leading question "Who knows more about the citizens in their own country, Kim Jong-Il or Google?" Google has announced it is now supportive of the 'Do Not Track' (DNT) technology to prohibit websites from tracking users, enabled within the latest versions of FF/IW and the Chrome browser. See the FAQ: What Google's 'Do Not Track' move means. For all of the latest versions of FF/IW and the Chrome browser, the DNT option is enabled by checking off the Privacy Tracking checkbox choice in Preferences. For all of the latest versions of FF/IW there also remains the regular use of the relatively simple Ctrl-Shift-Delete keyboard-sequence to delete all the checkboxed Privacy History Settings' Browsing History, Download History, Form & Search History, Cookies, Active Logins, Cache, Saved Passwords, Site Passwords, and Offline Website Data. Fairly useful to carry out as often as possible. There is also another good option to use for FF/IW before Google tries shutting down this service: NoScript , website http://noscript.net/ From its description: Quoting:The NoScript Firefox extension provides extra protection for Firefox, Seamonkey and other mozilla-based browsers: this free, open source add-on allows JavaScript, Java, Flash and other plugins to be executed only by trusted web sites of your choice (e.g. your online bank).With NoScript, even when using GMail, one can still regularly disallow these Google-related scripting domains for slightly extra privacy: google.com google-analytics.com customizegoogle.com googlesyndication.com gstatic.com Besides these here, there are (and will be) no doubt other and better services that limit the amount of personal and private data Google can obtain from GMail and its flagship search engine, even with Google's revised Privacy Policy. |
| Bob_Robertson Feb 28, 2012 12:47 PM EDT |
Steven, Indeed, that's one of the reasons I like Kmail. Full, nearly transparent, integration of GPG both MIME and in-line plain text. ComBob, I had one of those grocery cards, I just never found the time to fill out the form. |
| Steven_Rosenber Feb 28, 2012 12:59 PM EDT |
My grocery card is under a fake name, and Trader Joe's has no card ... |
| Steven_Rosenber Feb 28, 2012 1:03 PM EDT |
A nice explanation on how to do this for Enigmail in Thunderbird: http://enigmail.mozdev.org/documentation/quickstart-ch2.php.... |
| JaseP Feb 28, 2012 1:08 PM EDT |
I am of the following camp: You get nothing for free... Everything comes with compromises. For society, you give up privacy and control for a place to live, food to eat, ability to chose mates and friends, technology, etc. For software or services you get convenience for either money, technical skill, or privacy. Open Source is no exception. The GPL has terms and conditions. Other people own that code,... you can just use and improve it as long as you follow the rules. For Google, if you want their web mail and/or services, you need to sacrifice a little privacy. All things considered, they are remarkably unobtrusive in their policies. But if Google policies are too much for your sense of propriety regarding your information, don't use Google. I, for one, after reviewing their policies, have no issues with them. If they were the Gov't or if they released my info, IDing me to outsiders in what I do or look at,... THEN I'd have issues. But they use it to serve up adds to me that I'd prefer to see, anyway, over Viagra and hair replacement ads (no problems in either department here). They let me pay for stuff easier by holding onto my credit info,... no problems, they maintain an always on calendar for me, aggregating my data with others to sell to marketing firms,... no issues.But I am aware of what they are doing and make an informed decision. If you want total privacy,do not use the Internet. Do not make purchases with credit. Do not have a mortgage or own real property. Do not get married or have children. Do nothing noteworthy in society. If you want something in between ,... pick and choose. |
| Steven_Rosenber Feb 28, 2012 1:14 PM EDT |
I think one can give up use of Gmail in order to avoid being a money-generating customer for Google yet still participate in other societal actions such as owning property and not be a hypocrite. The line can be set at various places and not just all-in or all-out. Sure use of credit cards generates a marketing trail, and junk mail that results is a pain, but there's a lot of benefit as well. Gmail provides a benefit, but we can replicate that benefit cheaply without Google's "assistance." Considering how much Google stands to make from targeting advertising to the average "user," and how cheap it is to either run our own mail systems or obtain e-mail service elsewhere, I'd rather fork out a few bucks a month (like I do for my shared-hosting account, which includes e-mail) and push the marketing noise down a few decibels. I'd even consider paying for Google Apps if it meant that much to me. |
| JaseP Feb 28, 2012 1:32 PM EDT |
Don't for a second think I was labeling anyone as a hypocrite or saying that's all or none... there are choices to be made. If you don't want your data mined for setting marketing data tables, then don't use it... period. If you don't want your searches to be indexed, don't log in with an account, or use some form of ID hiding tool. While I wasn't calling anyone a hypocrite, I was pointing out that there are extremes. There really is no such thing as total privacy. Never was. Human beings are social animals. Birth certificates track our entry into the world... Death certificate track our exit. It is impossible to avoid other people in between. So you need to make decisions as to how much and what you want to share. Most of those decisions are up to you. Some are not. There are some people that have little to no presence on the web. Others stick out like a supernova. It's all about compromises... |
| Khamul Feb 28, 2012 1:44 PM EDT |
@CombBob: I use those discount cards all the time, and that always seems to be the way they work: they hand you a new card which gets you the discount and a blank form, asking you to fill it out and return it. There's nothing that actually forces you to return the form; you can just toss it in the trash and keep getting your discount. So all they can do is gather data on purchases by customer_1234, not any named person. @Steven: Trader Joe's is good for some items, but they have no meat. Whole Foods is the best place around here for that, since they have free-range chicken and grass-fed beef and bison. The meats in the regular grocery stores taste awful; I don't know what they're doing to those poor animals, but it isn't good. WF doesn't have any cards either. The only way to have secure email is with GPG, since it's all transmitted in the clear. The problem is that virtually no one actually uses GPG, so you can use it to trade secure email with your geek buddies (only the FOSS-using ones, and only the ones who even bother to use GPG), but that's it. For places where it'd actually be useful, such as for business correspondence, it's unusable because no one uses it. I have a small business; if I tried exchanging purchase orders and invoices or any other confidential communications with my customers using GPG, I wouldn't have any customers. |
| ComputerBob Feb 28, 2012 1:53 PM EDT |
I broke up with Google a month ago: http://www.computerbob.com/wp/i-have-broken-up-with-google.p... |
| tracyanne Feb 28, 2012 6:02 PM EDT |
My gmail accounts exist so I can access things that require some third party membership, so having one or more gmail accounts makes it easy for me. I never log into those accounts, for email |
| BernardSwiss Feb 28, 2012 8:46 PM EDT |
Getting a new "loyalty card" doesn't help at all, if you blithely hand over your credit card -- or worse, your AirMiles card -- with it. Just remember; every competent study ever done shows clearly that the customers (AKA "consumers") would much rather have the "lower prices" marked on the shelves and the products, instead of messing about with those plastic tracking tags. And of course it would be less work and trouble for the vendors, as well. Think about that. And while you do so, remember those stories that come out occasionally when someone once again notices that the same product (eg. a book purchased online) can be priced differently depending on which computer is accessing the site, or whether the user is logged on as a regular customer (no, the "established" customer is NOT the one who gets the "special deal"). |
| jdixon Feb 28, 2012 8:50 PM EDT |
> Just remember; every competent study ever done shows clearly that the customers (AKA "consumers") would much rather have the "lower prices" marked on the shelves and the products, instead of messing about with those plastic tracking tags. And of course it would be less work and trouble for the vendors, as well. Or if they must have a loyalty card, why can't they create a universal one that they all can use, so you don't wind up with a dozen or more of them? I'm sure Google would be willing to give them a hand with that, and even handle the ads for them. |
| BernardSwiss Feb 28, 2012 8:57 PM EDT |
Aside: how do these new development over "Do Not Track" protocols affect "web-bugs" (eg. single-pixel, transparent gifs), etc? I haven't looked closely into it, but I can't help wondering how much this is PR, than real action -- even leaving aside the question of how easily these measures can be (and apparently are) evaded by those who still want to know, regardless. |
| ComputerBob Feb 29, 2012 8:25 AM EDT |
Quoting:I haven't looked closely into it, but I can't help wondering how much this is PR, than real action -- even leaving aside the question of how easily these measures can be (and apparently are) evaded by those who still want to know, regardless.My understanding is that browsers' "Do Not Track" options are only a way for users to express their preference -- Web sites have the choice whether or not to honor that preference. |
| Khamul Feb 29, 2012 3:09 PM EDT |
That's pretty useless IMO. That's like asking a murderous criminal to please be nice. |
| ComputerBob Feb 29, 2012 6:29 PM EDT |
But maybe some murdererous criminals would choose to be nice -- if you said "please." |
| gus3 Feb 29, 2012 7:02 PM EDT |
Remember, John Wayne Gacy made the kids laugh! |
| ComputerBob Feb 29, 2012 7:22 PM EDT |
"Chicken Soup for the Serial Killer's Soul" -- the title of a book being read by a jailbird in a New Yorker magazine comic a few years ago. |
| ColonelPanik Mar 01, 2012 1:33 PM EDT |
At this point the only google service I look at is Google News. Is there a better news source out there? |
| Bob_Robertson Mar 01, 2012 2:19 PM EDT |
http://rationalreview.news-digests.com/ But that may not be up your alley. |
| ColonelPanik Mar 01, 2012 5:23 PM EDT |
@Bob Robertson It is the street I live on. Thanks. |
Posting in this forum is limited to members of the group: [ForumMods, SITEADMINS, MEMBERS.]
Becoming a member of LXer is easy and free. Join Us!