No Google phone without data plan
No Google phone without data plan...
Since Google is already has my contacts, I wish that Google provided a phone client/tool/app that did not try to verify my phone by phone number, since I do not have a live phone number and do not have a data plan.
I tried installing (what is it? Talk?), but it wanted to verify me by my phone number. I entered my old, expired number on a lark, and of course it failed.
I once wanted to use Kakao, back in late 2011 or early 2012, but the damned app tore through my contact list, without giving me a chance to cherry-pick what contacts Kakao would be able to see. Then, in 2012, when I went to Korea and met up with a friend who either interns in Kakao or knows some one reasonably well-placed in Kakao, I told him how infuriated I was that Kakao combed my contact list, and probably scooped up all sorts of non-phone contacts whom I entered and to which I appended personal notes. Nothing ever became of it, to my awareness.
Just days ago, I was going to try another phone app, but it wanted permission to review and modify my contacts and other things.
WTF is google so goddamned reticent about giving users a private, maximum security vault so as to deny apps from going through our phone lists?
Suppose one keeps several friends or contacts in the phone, one of whom has a permanent restraining order to stay away from another contact in my list. Now, if one of these apps, including google and facebook, start meta analyzing these people and determines we have not listed either on our friends list, but one or both of them has a fb or g+ account but has not told the other, and both set themselves up to be diffficult for the other to be found, then one of these frackin' phoning or chatting apps might one day say, "So and so is a friend of soo an soo.... Why not connect?
This is fu*king dangerous, and there needs to be a powerful lobby to once and for all put an end to this, no matter what the telcos, fb, google, or anyone else thinks or says.
What Kakao and these other apps are doing is akin to peering over the shoulder of someone opening his or her wheelbook (flip-open paper contact/note pad/tablet), and then being quasi-vulnerable to being an agent of a snoop who wants to scan that book of contacts.
Just infuriating.