"If you are nodding your head 'yes' and already have a Google+ profile, then you're in luck."
glad I read the last paragraph as I was going to ask what if you are shaking your head "no'?
Your wishes have been granted: Google has quietly added a new "feature" to Gmail that allows anyone with a Google+ account to send you email even if they don't know your actual webmail address. Over the next few days, Gmail users with Google+ accounts will start seeing names from their Google+ circles suggested as potential …
I turned that annoying thing off as soon as it was implemented.
I already have several email accounts (for different things like work, personal, a few sites I run, etc) and it can be a pain having to look at each one without having to fight through several sub folders on each account.
« "Have you ever started typing an email to someone only to realize halfway through the draft that you haven't actually exchanged email addresses?" »
Hmm... no.
[ And if I tried to pull that one off as a business case for a product, I'm pretty confident I'd be taken out and shot. ]
"What really pisses me off is that they claim they are doing all this nonsense for our own good."
I sent them a reply I doubt they will ever open to sort out their Usenet problems before they continue to ruin the rest of their services. Maybe if I had been polite about it wouldn't make the slightest difference?
Mind you, the Labs feature that give you a reminder if your email contains the word 'attachment' but you haven't actually attached a file, that one is genius. Forgetting to attach a file is a bit more widespread than forgetting that you don't have someone's email address.
Not to mention, if I don't have someone's email address there's no chance I'll know them on G+.
A couple years ago I signed up for Google+, hoping it might be an alternative to Facebook's ever increasing anti-privacy and pro-creepy changes. Probably 10 or 15% of my Facebook friends also did so, or at least that's how many found me or I found when I'd login a couple times a week those first few months. Yeah, throwing my lot in with Google was naive, but I figured it couldn't hurt.
Rather than trying to provide a refuge for people who feel Facebook was going too far, they seem to be trying outdo Facebook in that respect. As a result I still use Facebook (because that's where everyone else is) and my Google+ account is acquiring tumbleweeds that rival those of my Myspace account.
"A couple years ago I signed up for Google+, hoping it might be an alternative to Facebook's ever increasing anti-privacy and pro-creepy changes. Probably 10 or 15% of my Facebook friends also did so, or at least that's how many found me or I found when I'd login a couple times a week those first few months. Yeah, throwing my lot in with Google was naive, but I figured it couldn't hurt."
Likewise. I also held the view that Google were providing some useful stuff - the price of which was letting them into a few nooks and crannies, but I could tolerate it.
Then they killed stuff I found genuinely useful, while at the same time increasing the number of nooks and crannies they wanted into, and increasingly far to boot.
Now, Google sees a lot less of me.
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Plenty of weasel words, so they can do anything with it. Provide/improve services can mean target advertising at you to make mo money.
3.3. What does Microsoft do with my content? When you upload your content to the services, you agree that it may be used, modified, adapted, saved, reproduced, distributed, and displayed to the extent necessary to protect you and to provide, protect and improve Microsoft products and services. For example, we may occasionally use automated means to isolate information from email, chats, or photos in order to help detect and protect against spam and malware, or to improve the services with new features that makes them easier to use. When processing your content, Microsoft takes steps to help preserve your privacy.
The setting is there so you can disable the feature before it's turned on; the email will announce that it's been turned on. They did the same thing to let us opt out of having our profile images on adverts before the feature went live (but in my case they pre-disabled that feature for me based on what I'd selected for other privacy options).
My "friends" will then be sorely disappointed.
Yes I have a gmail/g+ account with google that does not contain accurate piece of data except the number of the gift card for the Play store as I needed to register something when I set my android tablet (ditto Apple and Microsoft devices).
Needless to say I never ever check that email account, I am not interested in all the c**p that I can't uninstall on my Nexus 7 or ipad (at least I can uninstall or stop the processes on windows & mac - yes I'm looking at you maps(both platforms - my use case sees no need for them), facepalm , farcetime and twatter).
And my students wonder why I just a little paranoid about google et al and don't Twatter or Facepalm. I look forward to showing them South Park S17E01 when we go back in a few weeks :-)
I don't have any friends!Bwahahahaaaaa!
My plan is even cunning-er. I kill all friends, and keep their embalmed corpses in the basement. That way they never spam me with crappy emails, or invites to be fruitful farmers on their virtual farms! But, they do listen to all my anecdotes, without any pesky interruptions!
Mwahahahahahahahahahahaha!
I only got a gmail addy because I had an android phone and wanted to try a few apps. Since I ditched the phone almost a year ago and went back to my old 6310i I haven't logged in to it at all. I heard about this 'feature' yesterday evening so I logged in to my gmail account and was amazed at the numbers of emails that had arrived in the previous few hours.
I must make it clear that:-
1) my Gmail user ID bears no resemblance to my real name
2) I have never sent any emails from the gmail account.
Some of the emails were addressed to me using my real name. That is something that google alone can't do so that freaked me out.
That was it. I am in the process of deleting everything and getting rid of that account.
Guess who won't be using Google for search unless I'm logged into to my VPN which has a Point of presence in Frankfurt or Geneva.
posting this as AC simply because I don't want anyone else to try to find me on Gmail.
as for those websites that want to 'save your location data' they can go an [redacted].
"Nachum says the goal is not actually to give spammers a new way to mount an all-out assault on your inbox, as you might assume, but to make it easier for casual Google+ acquaintances to contact each other."
Traffic numbers are king.
Trafffi numbers are the big cold wet fish with which to beat others with.
'not actually' ffs!
If I remember correctly, a few months ago it was disclosed that the app makers were getting the real name of users buying their apps -- without the users ever being made aware of this fact.
A quick search turned this article (http://www.csoonline.com/article/728892/google-play-shares-too-much-personal-info-app-developer-says) up. I didn't track what happened after this.
i don’t use google search, google mail, picassa, or anything else I know is associated with Google who I consider to be even more intrusive than NSA/GCHQ. The email account i use is not a free one, I have had it many years and it is fine and relatively spam free. This just sounds like the next step on the road to sending Terminators back through time to kill John Connor.
...so you need to take action to keep things as they were...
I don't use G+, but I assume Google consider me a user since I have a GMail account and they are unified "for my benefit". I understood from the article that not just my connections but ANYONE can now spam me unless I turn it off? [See icon]
Google crap ...
So, I have a gmail account I used for youtube, I created a google+ account, and now, every time I want to access youtube, it asks me if I want to use my real name on youtube ... wtf? No, otherwise I would have set it that way ... over the past months, I have been getting this question again and again in different forms ...
I guess I will have to create a new account for youtube ...
It's incredibly easy not to use your real name. If you originally chose the handle Hans1 when you joined youtube then when you connect your YT account to G+ it will create a G+ Page called Hans1, with all your playlists and subscriptions preserved in YT. You can post to G+ and YT as that page (but you don't have to). Nothing you post in Youtube has to go on your G+ page, so if you don't even want an anonymous presence on G+ then you don't have to have one. But if you do want to rant anonymously on G+ you can use your page to do so (but they don't force you to do that, which is a point often missed by El Reg commentards).
You can choose to use your real name if that's what you really want, but look at the YT comments since the G+ integration and it's obvious that Google is not forcing users to do that, and hardly anyone wants to.
"how come there is no simple unsubscribe by email option?"
'Cos with Google once you're signed up to one thing as far as they are concerned your danglies are in thier hands. There is no escape, there is no need to try and live outside the Goggle bubble.
AOL had the right idea but were never ruthless enough to carry it through.
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It's getting increasingly difficult to avoid all this social network/cloudy stuff. Some news sites have done away with logins altogether and simply say "sign in with Facebook". Whatsapp rifles through your phone's address book and creates loads more "whatsapp" contacts. If you use Google, gmail, Picasa, YouTube etc, you'll most likely have a Google profile (and they're pushing Google+ all the time). If you have Android phones you'll see them in your Google profile, and I noticed over Christmas that contacts and calendar items are now synced to your Google account by default. We ended up with 2 new Windows8 laptops at Christmas, and in addition to the installed bloatware, the installed Skype app needs "A Microsoft Account" in order to get anywhere. They came bundled with cloud storage, as did MS Office, with it's own cloud offering.
I guess none of these things are intrinsically bad, and I can see that they can make things easier for people in an increasingly connected world. But if you'd rather manage your own life than have the likes of Google, Facebook and Microsoft helping itself to your stuff, you're going to have to work at it, 'cos everything is on by default.
"I guess none of these things are intrinsically bad, ..."
Until you discover that friend$ are matched up with their credit scores and the gaps filled in by association. You really shouldn't have friended that bloke who did a runner with the church collection.
Yes, I know you ticked the privacy option, but that doesn't apply to finance company who pays good money for the data set.
And yes, I know you don't believe this happens. I wouldn't have either until I talked to the developer whose was writing the code.
Maybe peopel would react better to this kind of thing if Google didn't turn it on by default, but instead made it available and then tried to explain to people why they might want to turn it on.
That or they'd realise they couldn't persuade anyone to turn it on because it's so obviously going to be far more trouble than it's worth.
I've been highly sceptical about Google for years now. And got quite a few downvotes on here to show for it... But they're not making Soylent Green, or building death camps. So I don't think they're evil. They're just fucking creepy.
I do quite like google. Gmail is excellent and a convenient way of handling all my email addresses from one place. The Calendar is handy, and the Drive is useful. The problem is their attempt to integrate everything. I have work use and personal use - and I want to keep them apart.
Recently I needed to upload some videos for clients to youtube, so I needed to create a youtube channel, but I didn't want to do it as 'me'. Simples - new Firefox private window, create a new minimalist google a/c and go from there (and as it's a private window the cookies don't get confused with my real google a/c that's already open) - just remember to write the a/c details down somewhere safe so I don't forget them. Did same thing when I needed to create some G+ pages for clients.
Basic principle works for other things as well - I don't do Facebook as 'me' but I have several accounts that I use for testing, work etc - again, just use a private window and it's no hassle.
It's easier to manage everything if you create the page as You. Nobody (except for Google) can trace the page to its owner but you can switch between your main account and the pages you own very easily. Same with the YT account (which is just a G+ page these days).
Within Calendar you have different calendars, which you can assign different colours and sync options. In Drive you can obviously use folders. My work and home stuff is all separate within a single account.
Began to move all my contacts away from Google (Gmail) when the ceased being user friendly, and made me jump through hoops to open Excel/Word attachments, in the weird system that they adopted. I can but block all social media now. Sad how Gmail has declined over the years, used to be the best, now bog standard awful.
Understand your pain, but how an email hosting service can be the best? By providing labels instead of folders? By presenting emails like chats? These are features of an "Email client". An email service is to be evaluated on the up-time, spam detection (and other core parameters). So, who has shown more marketing pushes on an email service (even without emails :) than Google itself?
I remember all the excitement when everyone just heard that Google is going to launch email services (and when it was invitation only) and declared the existing services dead.
I understand the arrangement I have with Google, which is why their services are free to me.
However their methods slightly disturbed me recently after splitting up from my other half. She got in touch a few days later, quite upset, asking why I'd installed a dating app. How did she know? Google had recommended it to her because as a friend of hers, I had also installed it.
I didn't even know they recommended apps to your contacts. That bothers me somewhat, and I know they won't make the distinction, but recommending things like dating apps simply go too far. It made me reassess what they do with what they know about you.
Kind of shook my faith in them (whatever faith I had) a bit.
It's a bit like finding out when people tag you on Facebook as being somewhere. I deliberately don't reveal my location on Facebook - so why they f*ck should other people be able to, particularly in real time? Yes there's probably an option to turn it off but that should not be on by default. These idiots will someday kill their golden goose through over-reach.
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If a friend of mine has my email address and has Google+, I don't mind them being able to import their Gmail info into Google+ to email me. But if they don't have that information in their Gmail account I don't want them locating me by some gawd awful search.