Google Deleting Private Profiles 312
An anonymous reader writes "Google announced that it will no longer support private Google Profiles after July 31. The move comes as Google is rolling out its latest social experiment, Google+. Those who have already been admitted to Google+ will see their Google+ profiles replace their Google Profiles. At the moment the only information Google requires users to reveal is their name and gender."
Google+ (Score:2, Interesting)
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If your Google profile was ALREADY public, that's true. If your Google profile was private (as you would expect from those who care about privacy issues) your are prompted and asked if you want it to become public in order to join Google+. If by the end of this month you do not make it public it will just be deleted, not automatically disclosed. The only mandatory information in the public profile is name and age.
Re:Google+ (Score:4, Funny)
The only mandatory information in the public profile is name and age
Thereby ensuring that a large percentage of sign ups lie about one, or both.
Re:Google+ (Score:4, Insightful)
Well just don't use it.
I don't use facebook, nor linkedin, nor google, I will not use google+.
I feel very good, have friends, work, hobbies and interest, and don't waste time on social networks trying to find new friends while leaving behind the old real ones.
Social networks are just a fraud.
Use the name Bull Shit. (Score:2)
And call it a polite proper profile.
Re:Google+ (Score:5, Interesting)
I feel very good, have friends, work, hobbies and interest, and don't waste time on social networks trying to find new friends while leaving behind the old real ones.
Maybe your friends are just as odd as you then, nothing really wrong with that but the reason most of us feel the social pressure is because almost all my "old real" friends now are on Facebook. That's where they chatter and share pictures and make events and whatnot, it's not that they're purposely shutting you out but you're the special case. You're the one "being difficult", why can't you just get a profile just like everybody else? Sometimes they plain old forget that they have to tell me via a different means than everybody else. So I caved, my profile is on Facebook. And if everyone moved to Google+, I'd probably have to follow. If that hasn't happened to you, well then you're in the same group as my parents, they're not on Facebook, have no reason to join Facebook and good for them. It doesn't help everyone else who feel they have to either sign up or they'll drift apart from the friends they already have.
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No. Rather it's you who are confused as to the purpose of social networks.
Social networks aren't about trying to find new friends, they're about maintaining contacts with the ones you have. Yes, you can use them to find new ones (and I've met some great ones on Live Journal and Flickr), but that's not
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Agreed. There are plenty of legitimately beneficial uses for Facebook, but Slashdot folks are naturally drawn to the anti-social because of our lifestyle and group culture, and so they don't bother thinking that maybe, just maybe, social networking can be rather useful.
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Both are marks of people who know how to use their time very well. Television is a wasteland of drivel; Facebook typically isn't much better, however it also adds privacy exposure and exclusionary concerns.
Television is probably one of two or three technologies that offered the most potential to advance our civilization; unfortunately, it never even came close to being used well, and finally devolved into primarily being used to consume fake news sources like Fox, "reality" shows, and various types of ficti
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google is worse than facebook? have you ever seen what facebook does with your data even when you delete your profile?
nice though, we love the whole "GOOGLE IS EVIL" line. keep trottin out the lies all you want.
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google is worse than facebook? have you ever seen what facebook does with your data even when you delete your profile?
nice though, we love the whole "GOOGLE IS EVIL" line. keep trottin out the lies all you want.
Google worse than facebook? Doubtful. Either being better than the other? Even more improbable. Fact is, if you're posting personal information to a public or semi-public forum like facbook or Google+, it can be used however the company decides - if you don't like it, don't use it. Or follow the old adage: "if you wouldn't put it on a billboard, don't put it on a webpage".
Re:Poor Liddle Microsoft Troll (Score:4, Insightful)
As a parent trying to guard the safety of my children online, I can't allow them to have these accounts, for the exact reason cgeys points out. It's sad, because here's this wonderful tool, that I have to treat like a gun in the house.
- Dan.
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If that's a problem for you, here's a tip: DON'T USE YOUR REAL DATA.
People could not care less if your children are named Mr. and Ms. Herp Derp.
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And when they start collating everything you do by IP address collision? IPv6 or MAC address?
Things you did as Mr. Herp Derp suddenly pop up on your profile for all to see anyways?
The days of "Don't Be Evil" are long gone. Google are fucking evil.
Re:Poor Liddle Microsoft Troll (Score:5, Insightful)
My wife and I are about to have our first child and I've had to ask my friends and family not to post pictures of it on facebook. I want my child to have the choice to develop their own online identity and not have to worry that some day when they go to find employment some HR jackass isn't going to google them and use what other people have posted against them.
The responses I get when asking people not to post pictures of my kid online are ridiculous. Everything from "Oh, you're just paranoid" to "Well, I'm going to anyway.". It's pretty sad when a parent can't make a decision to protect their own child without their own parents giving them a hard time.
The other issue is that when kids are young they don't think/realize that when they post pictures of them and their friends drinking under age, smoking pot or other illegal activities it's out there and anyone can find it. All it takes is for them to just be caught/tagged in a picture with others doing it and they're up the creek.
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You're spot on, but for a different reason. HR isn't going to care about baby years, but Hospitals have security measures because they are great places to find and steal babies.
Most all recent smart phones and some newer digital cameras will store coordinates in in the jpeg exif data ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geotagging [wikipedia.org] )
You can post edited photos with the exif data removed, but I would check your own facebook pages for information that might link to you to a specific region within a big city. Examples
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Because your little snowflakes are so special someone's going to stalk you on online, go sleuthing until they track you down and then create an elaborate scheme to kidnap them ? Unless your last name is Rockefeller or Hilton, I doubt that scenario is plausible. Criminals are lazy buggers and opportunists, they'll just grab a kid off the street.
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"Just because one might be paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't out to get you."
No, you're paranoid. A child is FAR more likely to be kidnapped by a family member than a stranger. And if a stranger does want to kidnap a child, there isn't any shortage of them. He or she doesn't need to go looking at GPS coordinates in family photos.
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You're spot on, but for a different reason. HR isn't going to care about baby years, but Hospitals have security measures because they are great places to find and steal babies.
This has got to be extremely rare. My guess is similar to the odds of getting struck by lightning.
And a 30 second google turns up that in 1983, 101 babies were stolen and 94 of them recovered [google.com], out of 4 million babies born [google.com] (old and new statistics, but I don't imagine they're off by more than a factor of two).
So the odds of your baby
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What if you *didn't* take every conceivable precaution and something *did* happen?
was, what if the kid was kidnapped from school, or the hospital because a friend or family member carelessly posted a Geotagged image on facebook. I know kids were abducted before facebook, but telling the world where and when your kid is alone is asking for trouble.
The worst part is you might not even know someone is posting pictures of your kid online and who knows who's getting access.
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I think what he meant by
What if you *didn't* take every conceivable precaution and something *did* happen?
I know what he meant.
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Strange coincidence: a talkative colleague on the other side of the office just said to someone "no, the first time I got drunk I was 18". The people around him said "what, really?!" (and 18 is the legal purchase age for alcohol here).
Why should an employer care? Everyone (else) drank before they were 18, no one seems to be any better or worse at their jobs because of it.
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Would you want someone openly vocal about how they broke the law when they were younger teaching your kids?
1955 called ... (Score:2)
That's how bad laws get changed, by people openly breaking the law.
1955 called - Rosa Parks wants to have a talk with you.
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My wife has a series of photo albums where her mother took pictures of her as she was growing up. There are plenty of pictures of her naked as a baby, toddler. Maybe those aren't so bad, but there's one picture when she was about seven and had the chicken pox really bad that her mother took several full frontal nude ph
Re:Poor Liddle Microsoft Troll (Score:4, Insightful)
I know plenty of good people that did drugs and drank under age that went on to do good things. Had they been caught and charged in their earlier years they probably wouldn't have had a chance to do anything else.
For example there are several presidents (Obama, Bush and Clinton to name a few recent ones) that admitted to doing drugs. Would they have become president if they had been caught earlier? I have my doubts.
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Great Idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously? Doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. My state can't afford to pay its bills and is thinking about privatizing state prisons, and you want to lock up kids being kids and ruin their future. When I was 18, the drinking age was 18 and nobody had a shit fit until MADD convinced Reagan to blackmail the states into raising the age. I'm all for locking up violent criminals, but the sheer number of new "offenses" being dreamed up every year is why we have the largest percentage of incarcerated population in the civilized world. All these paranoid, law-and-order-at-any-cost, types are just plain stupid...
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FFS, I did a lot of things, as a kid, that could have landed me in trouble. Like shooting a duck, out of season, for my dinner. Yep, I shot him, and ate him. Because I'm color blind, I couldn't identify that duck precisely. I saved a few feathers though, because I thought they'd make nice fishing flies. Some old timer saw those feathers, and came half unglued. "You didn't kill that duck, did you? They are protected!" "Oh, no sir! I found these feathers down by the creek!"
And, that wasn't the very w
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how can you defend a kid smoking pot?
How can you defend sending a kit to jail for smoking pot? He's not hurting anyone but himself (if that!). Sending him to jail hurts him a lot more than pot. What sense does that make?
seriously, however cool it is to do drugs, it is still very harmful to you. and we should be trying to prevent kids from falling into the vicious cycle of drugs>poverty>prostitution>drugs and so on.
True, everyone who uses drugs ends up whoring themselves out. For instance, our
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You realize that Google's privacy policy doesn't mean shit when a persons profile is public for any length of time. All it takes is a scrape from an unscrupulous host to collect the data to sell to the highest bidder. this is a bad move for privacy and personal choice. I know /. loves all things Google, but this is just a bad idea and it's being done for strictly monetary results to Google's bottom line.
Scraping of social sites already happens with the data going to the highest bidder. It's happened on Face
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I dont know, he's kinda right.
But mostly wrong; it's a classic troll which successfully got modded up. See, for example this post [slashdot.org] for a quick explanation of why it's wrong. Or you could just check your account settings [google.com] which include the option "no public profile".
When I had to create a google acc to use youtube, I had the same idea about Google back then. They will identify me with my modem only a few years later... I dont like this connected account things on the net. Personally.
Google's privacy statement [google.com] says you can access and control (even delete) any detail you don't want them to have, except stuff they are legally required to retain. However, I do agree on the dislike for connectedness of personal data. One solution is DON'T SIGN UP! Another s
Consciously opt out? (Score:5, Interesting)
I never had a Google Profile and opted out of Buzz as soon as I could.
How do I opt out of Google+?
What even was Google Profile?
Re:Consciously opt out? (Score:5, Informative)
How do I opt out of Google+?
https://plus.google.com/u/0/downgrade/ [google.com]
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Can you opt out of Google+ without being invited to Google+?
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Noooooooo! *head asplodes*
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It really wouldn't surprise me if they made empty 'profile stubs' for everyone who hasn't joined. Perhaps with a button labelled 'Add my detail!' They really want to make inroads against Facebook. The Buzz fiasco won't stop them, they may be more cautious but they are getting desparate.
Re:Consciously opt out? (Score:4, Funny)
* Google's definition of evil may differ from your and/or commonly held definitions of evil.
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Using your real identity anywhere on the internet for any reason is just begging for complications.
Frankly, I think it's stupid, I've never done it and I won't ever do it. hell, I don't even associate my profiles between the different websites I visit
digg dosen't need to know that i'm bob on slashdot and ralph on stumble and neither does any other site.
If I want a friend to know I tell them myself
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Using your real identity anywhere on the internet for any reason is just begging for complications.
That would depend on your name. Having a very common name is often a hassle (I had to sign an affidavit when buying the house to affirm I wasn't any of the many Michael Andersons in the state who were in major legal trouble). But as you can see I'll use it on the internet. When there are at least two of us on my block alone and pages of M. Andersons in my city's phone book and many more who aren't me that show up in a Google search then I'm not too worried.
If you do a search on Google for me I can be found
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I'm not a citizen of the nation of Greater Google, even though I'm a frequent visitor.
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You do that - let us know how it goes.
if you can still find him around... chances without google, he'll may be nowhere to be found ;)
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except one: google search. almost everything else has a decent alternative.
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I've been using DuckDuckGo for about a year now. Occasionally it doesn't find anything useful and suggests I try Google. Every time I've done so, Google has given me a load of irrelevant results. I've not yet come across a search where Google gives me helpful results but DDG doesn't. It has a nicer user interface, a better privacy policy, and defaults to HTTPS, so I'm not sure why I'd want to switch back to Google for search.
Same here - it's my default on every firefox install (takes a moment to setup, but it's worth it). I'm still using Chrome for some stuff, but have been having performance issues with it a lot recently, and am about ready to throw-in the towel on it.
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I just tried DuckDuckGo , it brought back nearly the same results as Google, except Google did a hell of a lot better bringing the more relevant results to the top.
I'm guessing it's because Google tracks me that I get better results. If I use Chrome in anonymous mode, my Google results are much closer to DuckDuckGo's results, close enough to be the same for me. But since DuckDuckGo doesn't track me, it will NEVER have better results than Google for me, assuming they bring back the same things every time.
Tha
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You can use Google Search without having any sort of Google "account", accepting their cookies or permitting their JS.
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Apart from the search engine and maps, Google has no essential services, so it's possible. However, I tried to get rid of their search engine by using duck and bing, but find myself to often switch back to google search. At least for the mostly academic search terms for papers etc. they still seem to have the best search results. I ended up by switching constantly between scroogle, google, bing, and other search engines. As for maps, I use them very rarely and for the purposes I use them (walking to confere
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At least for the mostly academic search terms for papers etc. they still seem to have the best search results.
I never found Google Scholar to be as good as CiteSeer for academic work - especially since Google Scholar rarely gave enough information to cite properly and often linked to paywall sites rather than to the freely downloadable preprint that most academics put on their own sites.
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Google Maps is replaceable by Bing Maps, or openstreetmap.org I would have though you'd lose street view, but Bing Maps even has that. Whether you consider Bing or Google the lesser of two evils is up to you.
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This is what I do.
Buy webhosting with some company.
Set up a personal domain email address.
Use the email hosting with your personal domain.
Use IMAP to access your email and use POP to remove it from the server. This is what I do.
Keep your email on your own domain and it won't matter which email host you use.
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What do you use? The webhosts I've used have terrible email support - low mailbox sizes, no way to enable catch-all, etc.
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What do you use? The webhosts I've used have terrible email support - low mailbox sizes, no way to enable catch-all, etc.
Since he suggested setting up your own server, my *guess* is that he has as much space (more or less) as he wants. I do. I use a VPS and could, theoretically, have 50GB of email. I use that server for several other things as well, but that doesn't mean I'm really "limited" in how much I can store.
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> What do you use?
I use Newsguy. I have no experience with their Webmail though, and you might find their mailboxes too small (I download my mail every ten minutes so that doesn't matter to me).
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What would you suggest as a better free replacement? It doesn't even have to be free, cheap is enough, as long as it does not involve me giving them my credit card details.
This is serious question. And no, I don't want to take personal responsibility of keeping my own personal web mail service secure and up to date, so any suggestion must not include continuous administration of a server connected to the Internet.
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What would you suggest as a better free replacement? It doesn't even have to be free, cheap is enough, as long as it does not involve me giving them my credit card details.
This is serious question. And no, I don't want to take personal responsibility of keeping my own personal web mail service secure and up to date, so any suggestion must not include continuous administration of a server connected to the Internet.
Yahoo's webmail, imo, has a better interface.
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Want to opt out? Well, then I guess you can live in the hinterlands and die young! [theonion.com]
Paranoia much? (Score:5, Insightful)
Unlike some of the comments here state, Google+ does *not* make all of your stuff public the second you enter it. For each field that you fill in there is a box that states (initially) "Everyone on the web", once you've filled in the field you get the chance to chance every bit of profile information and decide exactly who it goes to. With your real name for example you can choose to share it with everyone, only people in your circles, people in extended circles (friends of friends), with a specific circle i.e. family only or work colleagues only or you can choose to keep it completely private, or you can just not fill it in. As stated in TFA there are only 2 pieces of info you are *required* to give. If you're that paranoid you can make your nickname public or just to IRC friends for example so you know they'll get a piece of info that they can identify you by but not the rest of it.
It's really a great system in my opinion, I love the flexibility and fine-grained settings, miles better than Facebook.
Also for the record this: "When you join Google+, your profile is already public to the whole internet and search engines. And because it's Google, they have already indexed it by then. There is no way to set it private before it's already public." is complete crap as the settings I mentioned above are applied before you even hit the "Save changes" button on the profile page.
At least take the time to learn about the thing you're publicly slating, though this is slashdot so I guess you can't expect any actual facts here anymore.
Re:Paranoia much? (Score:5, Informative)
It's as bad as people saying they don't want to use Facebook because, gasp, "they" will learn about you. I worked as a marketing database analyst - they have known about you for years. For pennies I could buy demographic data (per household) for my metro area telling me if someone was likely to own pets, what type of money they made, what their job was, their ethnic background and other mundane details. If people are really concerned about their privacy, as much as they claim here, I wonder how they even get to Slashdot. How did they sign up for Internet service - if stolen, how did they get their PCs? Did they ever do anything that could have been sent up to companies like Experian? Because if so - "they" already know.
And really - "they" don't care. Then just want you to buy more tanning visits.
Re:Paranoia much? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a difference between the USA and Europe. In Europe, companies are not allowed to sell your data on to other people, and it must be used for the purpose it was provided. Europeans feel extremely and personally threatened by the US attitude of "All your information is open, and everyone knows about you".
The "Default deny" mindset is deeply ingrained in the European mindset, due to the violent history of the continent. It's Darwinian: In times of war, loose lips will get you killed.
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this is just plain bullshit!
Google+ tracking cookie (Score:4, Interesting)
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i think it might have to do something with those ugly little '+1' buttons sprouting up all over the place. interestingly, ie9's tracking protection feature automatically blocks +1 buttons and fb like buttons too. i would like to see this feature built-in in a future firefox so that i can actually use it.
What's the big deal? (Score:2)
This isn't a social site. It sounds more like a "here's my web card" or something sort of site. Why would you even use it if you wanted that info private?
Safety first. (Score:2)
I don't think giving your real name on the internet is a good idea, at all. Because of the special way Internet work, some criminal can collect a lot of information about you, and use that information against you. Where you live, what are you friends, what is the name of your childrens, his age,... maybe you don't provide that information in one place, but using your name and other bits, people can get all the information. Is no safe. If you have a antivirus and a firewall to product your computer, why
Re:Safety first. (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think giving your real name on the internet is a good idea, at all. Because of the special way Internet work, some criminal can collect a lot of information about you, and use that information against you. Where you live, what are you friends, what is the name of your childrens, his age,...
Hi, my name is Benjamin de Waal. My alias here is "yttriumoxide", but elsewhere I usually go by "YttriumOx" or similar.
I currently live in Hannover, Germany. Specifically, in the suburb called "Heideviertel". However I was born in Dunedin, New Zealand and have travelled rather extensively, including living in 5 countries so far and visiting somewhere in the region of 40 (I have a list somewhere, but not with me right now).
I have a lot of friends all over the world, on account of having lived in many different places.
My wife's name is Steffi (Stefanie) and my 3 month old daughter is Sam (Samantha).
Honestly, I don't feel in the slightest bit insecure about "criminals" getting this information or "using it against me" (and no-one has ever effectively explained to me how this information could be used against me anyway (or especially "why" it would be) other than what I consider to be paranoid ramblings). You can search online for the above information and probably find out a lot more about me, including seeing pictures, learning about my interests (including illegal activities), finding out what I do for a job and what I've done in the past, etc. None of this bothers me. If I didn't expect it to be public, I wouldn't have put it online to begin with.
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That depends on how common your name is. If your name's John Smith, there's really not that much to fear.
My name isn't particularly common, but it's common enough for its Wikipedia page to list several sportsmen (one of them moderately famous), a politician, a musician and an actor. Criminals may be able to collect a lot of information about people with my name, but how will they be able to tie that information to me?
What is a "Google Profile"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Can someone elaborate please? Might help me decide if I care about this or not.
Re:What is a "Google Profile"? (Score:4)
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Social Experiment (Score:2)
"Social Experiment", I don't think that term means what you think it means.
"Social Networking Experiment", would be a very accurate term for Google+, but "Social Experiment" makes it sound like they are just trolling.
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somewhat OT, but can anyone recommend a good webmail provider whose business is not selling and analyzing our private communication, but providing a good webmail client? I don't mind paying, my privacy is worth it.
Google does not sell information and only lets programs(never people) analyse your messages (acc to Google's p.p. )
i believe the advertising analyzes is disabled on non-free corp accounts
and btw any anti spam filter analyzes your messages and any mail provider can read your mail
if you want privacy, then build your own (fire-)wall and setup a mail server behind this.
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"My privacy is *very* important to me. Who wants to look after my email?"
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"My privacy is *very* important to me. Who wants to look after my email?"
I don't want anyone to "look after my email", I simply want someone to provide transport, storage and protocols / user interface required for me to access it, without any privacy implications that are not mandated by that service. If you think that a business would be unable to provide this without stealing/exploiting private information, you're overly paranoid and should have grave concerns when seeing a doctor, or talking to a lawyer.
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I don't want anyone to "look after my email", I simply want someone to provide transport, storage and protocols / user interface required for me to access it, without any privacy implications that are not mandated by that service. If you think that a business would be unable to provide this without stealing/exploiting private information, you're overly paranoid and should have grave concerns when seeing a doctor, or talking to a lawyer.
National Security Letter [wikipedia.org].
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Does paid GMail use your private information for anything?
I'm sure there are plenty paid webmail hosts that can provide the service you want.
The keyword here is "paid". No company is going to give you anything without expecting something in return.
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I assume your ISP will have email accounts included in the cost and i have yet to find one without web mail access.
If you pay enough you can even get your own domain name from a lot of places i expect.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_webmail_providers [wikipedia.org]
You don’t need ads when you are getting five dollars or even a lot less a month for doing practically nothing.
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Buy your own domain and server. It's dirt-cheap nowadays and you can use it for lots of other things too.
Seriously, if you don't want other people able to read your emails without your knowledge the only way is to run your own domain and MX server (however even that is subject to the terms of your agreement with your upstream provider and host - probably only co-lo's would give you a guarantee that they're not just browsing through your server's disks, but you can't practically "force" SMTP encryption for
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Buy your own domain and server. It's dirt-cheap nowadays and you can use it for lots of other things too.
I would as a last resort, but I'd rather pay someone to look after it for security fixes, upgrades, spam filter configuration etc. than do everything on my own. Surely there must be providers that have a strict policy regarding privacy / personal information and that can be trusted to stick to it and not consider it something temporary until not sticking to it is profitable enough?
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Honestly, running an email server sucks. Unless you WANT to learn about it, it's something that's a lot better outsourced to someone who can deal with keeping spam filter rules up to date, dealing with mail floods, securing everything.
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You need a decent amount of knowledge to set that up secure and reliably.
My VPS host provides a few stock installs (I got a custom FreeBSD install, because it wasn't one of their defaults, although NetBSD is). The list includes a load of TurnKey Linux [wikimedia.org] installs. If you just want email, you can buy a cheap account, pick their webmail appliance from the list, and it's up and running almost immediately. You just need to point your DNS at it (most VPS hosts will also sell you a domain and do that bit for you).
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There are a bunch of choices out there actually. I work for one of them (FastMail, now owned by Opera)
We also provide excellent standards compliance and some pretty good power-user features.
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I got an invite into Google+, was on for a very short time (around 10 minutes I would guess), in which I already had several people "pre-add" me to their lists - for a brand new account (so how exactly have these relationships been formed, or is this some Buzz "feature" where certain people are automatically just linked to my Google+ account?)
Those people added your email address to one of their circles. The moment you signed on that was converted to your Google+ account.
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They are deleting nothing, it doesn't apply to you - and probably most people here. It's hardly even news at all to be honest.
Re:Removing private account info? (Score:4, Informative)
I got an invite into Google+, was on for a very short time (around 10 minutes I would guess), in which I already had several people "pre-add" me to their lists - for a brand new account (so how exactly have these relationships been formed, or is this some Buzz "feature" where certain people are automatically just linked to my Google+ account?)
It's probably worth pointing out that somebody "adding you" in Google+ is not the same as in Facebook or Twitter. Adding somebody to one of your circles in Google+ means you can post stuff TOWARDS them but it does not mean you can see anything of theirs other than their public profile. It's one way only unless they add you to their circle too and even then something you post to a circle I am in won't appear on my default stream. It appears on my incoming stream and I can then choose whether to include things from your circle in my default stream. Also with every post you can choose who (in terms of circles or individuals) gets to see it or not.
It's not perfect and could possibly still be open to abuse by marketeers but they seem to have made a better stab at it that Facebook
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Please elaborate on this...
Because I think even the CEO couldn't get Google to remove results [businessinsider.com].
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a) Way before Google+, Google allowed you to create a Profile, and mark it as Public or Private.
b) Private profiles couldn't be seen, and didn't show up in search results. (I had one.)
c) It was as if the Private profiles didn't exist at all, except to their owners.
d) Google sees this as a waste, and decides to delete this waste of space. Unless, of course, you chose to use the profile and make it v
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google stood up to the chinese government, and left the chinese market rather than censor their search results.
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You provide a well connected, sane and non-paranoid point of view. You are clearly helping the real debate going on about privacy.
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Or you could not put your real information in?
Phillip.
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Maybe I'll just have to migrate all my communications onto my own personal server/domain.
Which company will host your server?
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Any website can force you to fill a box in. They can't force you to fill it with true information.
Particularly if it looks like it may be true and they have no way of knowing otherwise.
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Facebook requires you to be male or female, but there's a checkbox titled 'Show my gender in my Profile', so you have the option of not making it public. From what I've read, your gender is both required and public on Google+.
What I'd like to know is whether there are options for transgendered or intersex individuals, who may not be comfortable identifying with either gender.
My Google account is a Google Apps account, so Google Profile and Google+ are still completely unavailable to me, so I'm not sure how