Dear Googles: Stop asking

Re:Dear Googles: Stop asking by antr on Saturday November 16, 2013 @01:34PM (#6745873)

Amen, google has turned into a genuine identity thieve. a few months ago, i think it was primarily driven by the whole prism thing, i decided to create a bogus google account, using a disposable phone number. Now I have a three google accounts: personal (for email), work (email, google apps, drive, adwords, etc), and my bogus account (a 70+ year old lady using google search, youtube and the rest of the google crapware like google+). this type of business, unilateral decisions are what made microsoft a "hated" company back in the late 90s, early 2000s. google isn't what it used to be, now it's a company packed with great engineers with managers making poor decisions.

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Re:Dear Googles: Stop asking by kordless on Saturday November 16, 2013 @01:58PM (#6745970)

Let me see if I understand you: The revelation of the NSA's activities made you fearful and so you decided to make fake Google accounts with fake phone numbers to alleviate those fears. All from the same IP address?

How exactly does this help keep your identity safe? Because they don't have your phone number tied to your account? How many times have you put your phone number in your emails to people? I looked, and over the last year I've sent my number to people over 150 times. I used to have it in my sig. How many people do that?

It seems like you and others are fearful of Google's actions because you are fearful of the government's actions. Remember, Google freaked out about PRISM, and the result was them encrypting traffic between their data centers to PREVENT the government from spying on your data: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/google...

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Re:Dear Googles: Stop asking by antr on Saturday November 16, 2013 @02:10PM (#6746027)

this action doesn't keep me safe, IPs are the same, behaviour is the same, search terms don't change, etc. All i'm saying is that the entire prism story, corporations not making an effort to keep users data safe, constant ad spam because i'm in the "ideal consumer" age range and location, etc, made me rethink how i present myself to google (and other services such as FB). i can only encourage you to simply change you age and relationship status to widowed and you'll see the change.

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Re:Dear Googles: Stop asking by eclipxe on Sunday November 17, 2013 @04:08AM (#6748170)

If I'm going to get spam, I'd rather get spam targeted towards me vs. a 70 yr old woman

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Re:Dear Googles: Stop asking by antr on Sunday November 17, 2013 @04:49AM (#6748267)

>targeted towards me

i'll consider doing that whenever facebook stops showing me sex related ads (condoms, pseudo-dating sites, etc.), bidding/daily discount sites, etc. and no, these ain't retargeting ads. the only decent ads i see are the retargeting ones.

it doesn't matter how many times i "hide this ad > Why did you hide it? > reason x" that it will continue to show me related ads that i have no interest in. "targeted" is one of those over-used buzzwords that i'm still waiting to do what it is supposed to do - i won't hold my breath.

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Re:Dear Googles: Stop asking by yuhong on Saturday November 16, 2013 @01:45PM (#6745917)

this type of business, unilateral decisions are what made microsoft a "hated" company back in the late 90s, early 2000s.

It was a lot more than that.

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Re:Dear Googles: Stop asking by rahoulb on Saturday November 16, 2013 @02:01PM (#6745993)

Maybe, but once trust starts to erode, the effects of it may not be seen for a few years. And once lost it's extremely difficult to get back.

I certainly get the feeling that Google's halo is slipping.

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Re:Dear Googles: Stop asking by davidgerard on Saturday November 16, 2013 @02:40PM (#6746146)

During the nymwars, I saw techies moving to Bing for search. Bing for search! That's when you know your brand is going toxic.

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Re:Dear Googles: Stop asking by dredmorbius on Sunday November 17, 2013 @04:12AM (#6748180)

I'm considering Hotmail over Gmail.

I you how much the thought pains me.

Though I'll likely end up with a smaller provider somewhere. Gandi.net or Sonic.net both have very strong pro-privacy and freedom reputations.

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Re:Dear Googles: Stop asking by adamconroy on Sunday November 17, 2013 @05:00PM (#6751156)

The problem is they effectively know all your accounts are the same. Your IP addresses/ browser / os / screen res etc are pretty much a fingerprint. Let alone any other ml techniques they can apply.

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