Google never should've tried to be "polite" about G+. It's only bit them in the ass and become a repeatedly-broken promise.
The intent here is reasonable: They have dozens of services with dozens of comment engines and user-systems and they need to consolidate that crap into something more coherent. Picasa/YouTube do functionally similar services but one uses video and one uses pictures, so it makes sense for Google to try to make their common-ground more common.
The problem is that fundamentally, G+ was too opinionated and Google leadership was too polite. The relationship should've been the other way around - G+ needed to be more flexible (better support for anonymous/pseudonymous posting) while Google should've moved decisively instead of soft-peddling it so many times and breaking promises to the users that implied that they had a choice about these changes. You can't not-have Plus.
What they should've offered is "I don't want a Plus homepage" and "I don't want to participate in Circles" which is an agreement they could have honoured.
That would be not a problem if they didn't enforce to be REAL id. Although as I changed my first and second names to random characters, they at first suspended my account "until I fix it", but after some time removed suspension and now I am someone whose name starts with small letter, than capital, then some more random letters and few numbers.
Can't you create a Page to use as a pseudonym? I admit the whole UI for Pages is clumsy and inconsistent, but the feature exists. You can wrap your Real ID with a layer of anonymity using a Page, as is the default approach for YouTube (allowing YouTube commenters to keep their old handles).
But in general, it seems clumsy and not very well thought-out or designed. A feature meant for allowing company websites is hacked into pseudonyms.
I hadn't heard that - my understanding was the problem was that G+ elevated the pseudonymous trolls too high in the ranking - because they're part of the G+ "culture", G+ treats them and their upvoters as popular power-users and gives them premium placement.
But either way, in any other general-purpose comment-engine, the host of the channel/blog/page/whatever would be able to allow/deny anonymous or pseudonymous users. AFAIK, all YouTube allows is whether you want to allow or deny comments in general.
While you're complaining about Google, how about you fix your website to stop giving away your viewers' data to third-party advertising/technology companies? A cursory glance at the source reveals:
How does using CDNs to load jQuery, font awesome, and some google fonts give away viewer data to third parties? I'm not sure about the tumblr stuff but I don't see how loading these scripts is malicious...
It is no different than linking to any third-party / external resource. Specifically, profiling information is delivered across the referrer and user-agent to name a few.
There is a more complete discussion on the network security stackexchange group[0].
And of course, outraged and harmed by this you proceeded to stop using Google services. They are paying for it by acting in a way you find distasteful, so of course you will show them by no longer using their services.
Or ... are you using their services while moaning about it? No, I'm sure you wouldn't do that.
I've never understood this condescension and self-righteousness towards those who complain about a service yet still use the service. It's as if complaining about a business you patronize is childish or petty.
Why does anyone think that? It's often economically rational for a customer to say "I'd like to continue using your product/service, but I have a specific complaint about it."[1] That's what all these posts about Google+ are doing.
It's not like anyone's shouting "We need to pass laws against this, right now!" Nobody is questioning Google's legal and moral right to force Google+ on us. Rather, people are saying it's a poor choice and Google's part, and it annoys customers.
[1] These issues are discussed in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty:
The basic idea is that an aggrieved consumer can either take their business elsewhere, which is termed "exit," or try to change the company's behavior through things like the OP's blog post, which is termed "voice." Customers sometimes choose voice as their first recourse, and if things get worse or don't improve, the customers sometimes exit.
When it comes to social media, people rarely "exit" when they're very dissatisfied. A few people do, but most of the ones who are displeased with changes in the service respond by shifting some of their previous uses of it to other services while continuing to use it in different or more reduced ways.
For example, people mostly didn't leave Facebook after getting the message that Facebook is bad for privacy, but in the early days of Facebook I could find nearly every single one of my friends' phone numbers and home addresses on their profiles, and the "phone book" feature was very useful. Now, hardly anyone puts their address there, only a minority put their phone numbers there, and the "phone book" feature is mostly forgotten (I don't even know if they've removed it, I haven't looked for it in a couple of years at least). What kinds of photos people post, and how much they share, has changed a lot over the years, but most of the people who pulled back in this way didn't delete their accounts, and still post material there when they don't care much if it "leaks".
I've observed a similar thing with Google services over the past couple of years. People pull back by shifting some of their activity to other providers, while continuing to heavily use Google.
Re-read the original article. When someone writes with such extreme language about a transaction they've apparently gotten value out of - then fail to even mention the idea of exit, then I suppose my response will let a little condescension and self-righteousness seep through.
Your inability to understand that is just not relevant.
The reason you are being downvoted to oblivion (as you should be) is that your entire argument is a red herring.
Whether the author continues to use Google services is utterly and completely irrelevant. The point of contention here is the sleazy way Google re-activates a service for them after they have explicitly disabled it. If your answer to this dilemma is to stop using Google services altogether, then I'm sorry but you just lost all credibility and will not be taken seriously.
Why? I try to use Google services as little as possible because I feel like they don't respect my privacy. I think it's reasonable that people who bitch and moan about Google but refuse to seek alternatives (they're out there!) are a part of the problem, not a part of the solution.
>>I think it's reasonable that people who bitch and moan about Google but refuse to seek alternatives (they're out there!) are a part of the problem, not a part of the solution.
Only if you think blaming the victim is reasonable.
Look, everyone knows that alternatives to Google exist. The problem here is that Google has pulled a massive bait and switch on its entire userbase. They started as a company that put its users first, and over time turned into one that tries to extract as much money from users as possible. And while it is possible to switch to other services, for a lot of people and companies this involves a significant time investment as well as an upheaval of processes and resources.
Heck, as a single individual, my Gmail address is listed in at least 25 different locations. Remembering what those are and then changing them alone would take me hours. And then there's static documents with my email address on them - resumes, cover letters, business letters, business cards, and more. Finally, there is the question of whether my new email provider offers integrated solutions for instant messaging, content sharing and collaboration, calendar, and more.
Basically, Google is a monopoly -- not in the sense of market-share but rather in terms of the completeness of their offering, and they are abusing the shit out of this. That's what's making people angry, and they have every right to be angry.
It's more the cognitive dissonance of believing one thing while seeing invalidation of that belief right in front of you. For a while it will be "this must be a mistake" before it gets to "Hmm, I guess I interpreted their motivations much differently than they actually are, time to move on."
To its credit, Google has a couple of fecal units worth of dashboards and data about retention and quality so somewhere there is a chart where the line has started to go flat, perhaps even down. Questions will be raised, bonuses will be put into jeopardy, and eventually a new consensus or messaging will be reached. It will be interesting to see if the company has reached the point where its ability to respond yet fatally trails the markets ability to change. Every company seems to get to that point eventually.
Moving off Google is not as hard as I thought it would be. I expect to only be using maps and Zagat in the near future, but this will be anonymous, the rest has been replaced.
1. Finally got my Google+ deleted. The reason I even had one to begin with was that Google forced it on me.
2. Started using DuckDuckGo, took about a month to get used to, but I am starting to like it more and more, not sure if I would go back to Google even if they weren't info vamps.
3. I could migrate to another email provider, but I am waiting it out for a bit longer to see what interesting alternatives pop up in the wake of this. But at that point, forwarding and phasing in a new email should be relatively easy.
4. Waiting it out with messaging, but will definitely move of GTalk/Hangouts for non-work.
I don't have anything to hide from Google, but their pushy approach is making me sick. It is just not worth doing business with people like this.
2) I've also switched to DDG, but I still find that google gives me somewhat better results for things related to programming are academics. Apart from that, I like DDG a lot.
3) That's the big, big problem for me. I could stop using virtually any other product labelled google without problem (ok, youtube excluded), but gmail keeps me there. Not so much that gmail itself is so great (it is good, for sure), but the act of switching emails, updating contacts left and right, is just a pain.
4) it seems to me that most providers for hangout/video type of things are equally obnoxious with the way they handle your data..
Going back to the email stuff, I guess I'm also waiting for a decent alternative to pop up, as I'm not inclined to switch 10 times in the next 6 months..
One note here, if you're using Google Apps, moving should be a breeze as you can just change your MX records. However, hosting your own email could be painful.
For me it is especially great since my primary email is an alias domain on Google Apps, which means i can move my primary email off of google apps while keeping my google account working (also grandfathered into their free plan).
So switching email is just the matter of picking my own host. That could take a while, however.
For 3: email forwarding + vacation autoresponse help a lot. You get the messages anyway and whoever emails you gets an automatic reply with your new contact information.
I find DuckDuckGo to be a nice alternative to Google, although I have to switch to google.com for certain searches.
As for email - if I can not connect with IMAP, I am still using the plain old HTML web interface for GMail. The new one has too much clutter. But I am also searching for an alternative with good uptime.
As such, Gmail is the only thing that keeps me connected with google. Any alternatives?
An Android device running Cyanongenmod (or another AOSP ROM) without any Google services is still an excellent phone. You can get pretty much any app you need from F-Droid or the Amazon app store.
Or, you continue using their services since they are the best value available, but also complain and point out problems you have with it. I think Google is happiest with this option, so they at least know what their users complain about.
I hear you. But I will point out that they are often just the default option not necessarily the best available.
I learnt that when they stopped supporting their news reader. It forced me to look at what had been out there all along, but I had simply not looked because their reader was good enough. They taught me in this way to look for alternatives that are often better.
Google isn't any more evil than they have ever been - they are however huge and it's almost certain that some aspect of what they do will rub lots of people the wrong way.
I don't avoid them like the plague, but I also don't stick to services I don't like and I suggest as much as I can seeking out alternatives.
If you don't like being the product that is sold, leave. If you like the trade for the value you get, than it's worked out well for you. I can't blame them for making an offer you chose to accept.
>> But I will point out that they are often just the default option not necessarily the best available.
That seems like the optimal place for Google to be. Aware of its user's complaints, but also aware that they haven't moved on, as well as what alternatives are being brought up.
I agree on some level, but you also can't say that this is a great thing. All these extreme opinions...
Can't we all just agree that Google is pretty great, but going through an annoying phase right now? Google _is_ taking advantage of the fact that most users won't leave, and I don't appreciate that. But at the same time, we are all slowly losing our patience, and in the long run this behaviour could hurt Google. I hope for everyone's sakes that this all settles down.
Is the only right of expression in your world is whether to use a service or not? Why should people be forced into silence if they don't like something? This seems especially relevant in a world where services are increasingly integrated.
I have started the painful migration from google slowly, we hate change but I am doing it slowly. This is what I am using as a replacement:
Gmail----> back to my old yahoo account
> Or ... are you using their services while moaning about it? No, I'm sure you wouldn't do that.
It makes a lot more sense to moan about something you use than to moan about something you don't. For example, I don't moan about how bad Katy Perry's album is because I don't own that album. I don't moan about how uncomfortable the seats in my old car were because I don't drive it anymore. I do moan about poor pick-up time estimates at a restaurant I frequent because I am actually their customer.
The idea that you should only complain about things you don't use is bizarre.
I've personally started removing myself from google services one baby step at a time. The whole spying and g+ thing has really left a bad taste in my mouth. They just don't seem interested in not creeping me out.
When you've been relying on a service for a while and the TOS suddenly change it seems fair to complain: OP would have probably picked a different service if he knew.
This has been the very essence of Google for the past two years. Forcefully assimilating existing services, where users already had data, into G+, changing functionality and terms, and generally leaving users to feel insecure about how privacy and access to their long-held data might or might not change.
What a far cry from '99-'03 Google, which used to release clever and surprising new data-browsing tools, each with a singular purpose, that just worked.
Yeah, I happen to like the integrated Google. When I get GMail confirming a flight, it automatically shows up in my Google Now. I can search for it with "When is my next flight?" I can search my Docs and Gmail both at once.
I happen like how far Google has gotten from those old, random, completely non-integrated days.
Exactly. When Google bought all these companies, it was disappointing to see them sitting as isolated buckets. I mean, did people thing these purchases were done as a Pokemon game? "Yay, Google got all 151 verticals!". How long did they let Blogger sit as a wasteland of spam?
Now? Now Blogger is Picasa for prose, and Picasa is Youtube for still images, and your Plus homepage is your central hub for all the discussion happening on those services. Obviously, Plus has problems, and lots of them. It's far too opinionated for something that's being used as a general-purpose comment-engine. Plus is a good Facebook, but it's a piss-poor Disqus, and Google is using it as Disqus.
But the overall strategy of consolidation? Long overdue.
Google is finally turning their holdings into a single impressive platform instead of a balkanized mess of isolated services.
I don't like the privacy implications, of course. But that's always been Google's business model ever since they launched GMail - they give you something awesome for free and in exchange they get to spy on you to provide targeted ads.
Well, Gmail isn't all that free, in practice. I imagine a lot of the people around here have enough email to have capitulated to Gmail's inevitable demands for cash. I did.
You're overblowing things. All of this madness has really taken place after Schmidt left, because up until '10 or so, Google kind of still embraced the "don't be evil" philosophy.
Google gives us all a lot of amazing technology completely free of charge. I use their search engine, email client and browser every day and for me their products are second to none. Google is one of the few companies that is really investing in the future with things like Google Glass and self driving cars. Personally, I'm okay with a few ads if that's what it takes for them to keep innovating and making the world a more interesting place.
That said, all these attempts to strong arm people into using Google Plus are really getting old.
It is because Google + is their new identity service. Everything requires it, instead of a gmail account. Google + is your Google identity. At the same time it is also a social platform because so what? Don't use it. Or, use it since it's really really useful.
The amount of rage people express about being "forced" to use Google + is as perplexing to Google as it is to me. It's an identity service.
You don't need to have a gmail account to use Google's services anymore you just need a Google identity. That's what Google + is. I don't know how many times I can say it but so far it seems like a lot of times. People want to rage.
Right, but the confusion is that both the identity service and their social network are called Google+. So it is hardly surprising that people get confused when they call two supposedly distinct services by the same name. Why not just call the identity service Google Account and then all the perception problems go away. Seems like a huge PR blunder. But then I'm not actually sure how much google really care about this, I think the rage about it is amplified in our HN crowd. Most google customers probably don't notice and of the ones that do the majority likely don't care.
I agree to a certain extent. But Google + and the identity service are so closely linked that I am having trouble imagining how they could have called it Google Account since everyone would be wondering what they need Google + for. Which is happening anyway but people haven't figured out the part where Google + is your Google identity yet. Even on, or especially on HN/Youtube.
The ability to comment and talk about stuff is going to permeate all of Google's services. I don't really see how else they could do it.
Maybe if they didn't force you to use your real name then everyone wouldn't be having freak outs?
But Google has not just started using G+ accounts for YT comments, they have mixed G+ shares with YT comments. Now much of what I see below YT videos are G+ shares along the lines of, "hey check out this cool video". That's actually less informative than the average YT comment.
You're assuming that the confusion isn't intentional. It is, to make people sign up for Google+ while disguising it as a identity service.
And more and more normal customers seem to be noticing, especially on Youtube. Here's one woman crying about about how the confusing G+ prompts lead her to lose all her uploaded videos. (Warning, strong language)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccxiwu4MaJs
- Start using the name "Google+" only for the feed / social network functionality. Because thats what people think it is.
- Make the social network an optional service.
- Separate the single-signon solution from Google+. Call it "Google Account" or something similar.
- Provide easy to use account identity functionality (instead of using "pages").
- Ask users if they want to keep the existing identity or use their master identity ONCE per service. Respect their decision.
- Allow users to switch to/from using separate identities from/to using the master identity.
This is what the old Google would've done. You know, the one that actually tried pretty hard to do the right thing (i.e. don't be evil). Not the one that is desperately trying to compete with Facebook.
Funny... a year ago I would have said Chrome[ium] had Firefox on the ropes. Now it's looking like Firefox has the upper hand on protecting privacy. And I am surprised to find myself thinking that even IE is probably preferable.
This has nothing to do with what browser is used. The user is being redirected to the login page to accept some new ToS, instead of being automatically logged in. This would happen with any browser that supports redirects and cookies, and if for some reason the redirect didn't work, they'd just politely ask you to click on a certain link to continue (and if cookies are disabled, auto-login would not work).
If I understand the link's post correctly, the user is being logged out of his Google Chrome profile (which is used to save your browsing data across devices) and being redirected to the login page to accept some new ToS. Accepting that ToS for the browser setting set up his Google+ profile, it seems.
As far as I know, no other browser (IE,Firefox,Safari) has a social network (and very few actually nudge you into logging in to some profile when using it) and so this has a lot to do with what browser is used.
The author would likely not get this behaviour on any other browser (I'm on Firefox, I use some of Google's services and my Google+ account is still disabled), which is another reason to believe this has a lot to do with what browser is used.
Yesterday I was editing a spreadsheet on Google Docs and pressed Cmd+C to copy some text. A window popped up saying "You need to install the Google Drive app to enable copy & paste functionality". Good one.
... that's not really better. Requiring the desktop installation of Drive for trivial cases like that means that the web-application isn't really a web-application, but rather a desktop application that uses the browser as a GUI.
Actually, that's due to Drive trying to support the system clipboard intelligently (e.g. such that if you pasted into MS Office, you'd actually get a table/cell structure, rather than just text). Browser APIs don't provide support for that level of copy-paste, so it has to be worked around.
Just last week I started using Firefox as my main browser (after three years of using Chrome), mostly due to "Sign in to Chrome" annoyances.
At one point I inadvertently signed into Chrome with my Google apps account, which then stored a lot more personal data in the cloud than I'd ever intended. When I noticed this sometime later, I tried to disconnect my account from Chrome—which is apparently not possible for a Google apps account—so the only fix was to delete the Chrome account and to lose my browser history and saved passwords...which I did, right before opening Firefox.
I love being signed into Chrome. If I looked something up on my phone while I was walking into work, I can quickly open it in a tab on my desktop. If I searched for a specific coffee shop on my desktop and only remember a couple of letters in the name later, chrome on my phone auto-completes. Among many other sweet features, I think it's worth just... signing in.
Firefox does this as well, and it doesn't require an account to do so. It also encrypts your personal data in the client, and allows you to set up your own sync server so that even your encrypted data never touches their servers if you don't want it to.
Hey, if it works for you then go for it, I just didn't like the way it seemed to be foisted on me. Perhaps it was an easier break for me as I've never cared too much about having my stuff—aside from email and calendar—perfectly synchronized between my phone and computer.
Huh? When you click the big "disconnect your google account" button in settings, it explicitly says you won't lose anything stored locally (including browser history and saved passwords), and you get a host of checkboxes allowing you to decide what to connect with your google account (including nothing), as well as an option to use a passphrase that encrypts everything locally before leaving your machine, ensuring that google couldn't read it even if it tried. Honestly I can't understand how you reached any of the conclusions in your post -- they simply aren't true.
There are plenty of things to complain about with how google in "unifying" their accounts, but Chrome sync isn't one of them. The only thing I'd want them to add is the ability to sync to your own sync server like Firefox (essentially no does it, but the option is important), but encrypting everything locally is equivalent enough for me.
> Google should be ashamed for trying to pay for their millions of dollars of infrastructure?
"Google's 2013 third quarter profits were nearly $15 billion; that profit is the difference between how much our privacy is worth and the cost of the services we receive in exchange for it. " (Bruce Schneier => https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/11/surveillance_...)
That's a little much. Google could still make a hell of a lot of money with completely untargeted contextual ads, which don't require me to trade any "privacy" at all.
This is a great question raised by Capitalism, and the extreme lengths the United States has taken it to.
How do you define how much profit is enough?
If you're suggesting Google can still make "enough", shouldn't McDonald's pay their workers a few bucks more and still make billions? Shouldn't banks lower fees and still make trillions?
In our current world, the only amount of profit that is enough is "more", and that will be attained at all costs (i.e. employees living below the poverty line, banks destroying the global economy and in Google's case, we lose our privacy)
That's not what I meant. I was using the colloquial "little much" to suggest that Schneier's statement was too sweeping to be accurate. If the U.S. passed a law tomorrow that made user tracking and profiling on the web illegal, Google would still make plenty of money from AdWords.
>Google would still make plenty of money from AdWords.
Of course they would.
And McDonald's would still make plenty of money if they were forced to pay a decent wage, and banks would still make plenty of money if they were forced to be more responsible and lower fees.
But you don't see that happening, because the drive for more profit is all consuming, and it's the corporations that have the most influence in these laws.
I actually don't get this mentality. You are saying you would prefer to receive irrelevant ads? To me the worst thing about advertising is its lack of relevance most of the time. When ads are targeted I at least feel like I'm getting offered things that appeal to my tastes. I find that much less bothersome.
I recently bought a faucet from an online plumbing company. I now find my browsing bombarded with ads for the same kitchen faucet, from that same company.
Of course this is a technology shortcoming. It doesn't mean that targeted ads are inferior, they are just not perfect.
The idea is that you get targeted ads for things you are looking for. Not always the recommendation is perfect, that is bad for you, Google, Publishers and Advertisers. If you can fix that you might be into something big.
I agree completely. The underlying assumption of Schneier's comment is that advertising provides no value to the consumer, which is untrue. Google has made advertising incredibly valuable to the consumer (they're clicking the links, after all!) which is the chief reason they're so profitable.
twoodfin said contextual, not irrelevant. Instead of adapting the ads to the user, you can adapt the ads to the content of the page they're being inserted on. The ads remain relevant (often more relevant, since targeted ads have a tendency to show you what you already know) without having to mine your personal data.
For example, if you go to Hack-a-day, all the ads are relevant for their user base, even though they're fixed and not automatically assigned by Google's All-Seeing-Eye.
Google could show me the most targeted ads in the world and I still wouldn't click them. So the difference is between things that I'll never click, and things that I'll never click but that needlessly aggregate data about me. That's an easy choice.
Just a wild-ass-guess, but I bet the order of importance for factors driving Google's search ad revenue goes something like:
- Search terms (AdWords)
- IP geolocation
- Demographics (age, gender, income: derived or otherwise acquired)
- Search/browsing history
The line between the last two blurs a bit, since surely Google will try to fill in your demographic blanks based on your search and browsing patterns. But regardless, the first two they can do completely anonymously, and anyone who wants can likely escape the last two with the right browser settings or privacy extensions. Personally it doesn't bother me that much, since the results relevance I "trade" my privacy for has value for me as well as advertisers.
Google is not alone in using dark patterns -- Facebook got tons of growth by using dark patterns around privacy. Google is copying that strategy a few years too late. The age-groups that are leaving Facebook are doing so b/c they understand the dark pattern maze for what it is and don't want to deal with it.
Nobody leaves Facebook, it is just used differently. That's a big detail that only a few articles seem to get correct. Kids are still on Facebook, with grandma and mom and dad, but they also have a Tumblr account.
>Google should be ashamed for trying to pay for their millions of dollars of infrastructure?
They paid for that before without being annoying, Facebook pays for theirs by being less annoying than Google. (Wow, thinking about this just now who would've thought the day would come so soon that Facebook is less annoying than Google.)
They silently activated his account in the background. That doesn't really seem annoying to me. If he wasn't looking for it, or didn't want to become enraged by it, he probably could have just ignored/dismissed the alert and never known better. Right now complaining about G+ is like complaining about Facebook privacy a few months ago. It's low hanging fruit that anyone with a blog can complain about to seem enlightened.
Good thing Google didn't do that. The blog author says right up front he agreed to the new terms.
And they didn't sign him up for anything, they upgraded his account. Still a single account, still with a single company, still with the same cost, still with the same privacy policy, still with the same everything - except it does more, now, if he so chooses to use the extra features.
Let's not pretend that Google are acting out of altruism. The blog author says that he was agreeing term for Picasa, not G+. It doesn't matter that the service is "free", the expansive privacy policy may be the same, it just covers more of the users online activity without their direct consent.
So, if you're running a... time management tool, let's say it's just a todo list. Then you create another tool, a time tracker so you can log your hours on your todo items. You should force them to sign up for it in order to use it? Personally, even if the tools were made to be able to operate separately of each other, I would give the users of my first tool access to the second one and link the accounts.
G+ is just an extension of their offerings. Just because the tides of the internets have flowed against it doesn't mean that anything involving Google plus is practically rape.
Dear google, please add a subscription option to your services - lets say 2USD monthly. In return - no tracking, no forcing and no data collection and totally turned off safe search - I have survived goatse, you have nothing to scare me with. I would gladly pay them and you probably make less from me in our current relationship. Thanks.
Just as a quick reality check: Google has about 300m MAUs [0] and for their last quarter made 14.8b in revenue [1], which with quick-and-dirty math leads to about $14.6/user/month
$15/m for an actual Google+ service where I'm guaranteed that I'm not being tracked, and I'd get no ads and all my personal data is completely safe and encrypted doesn't sound that bad.
You've rather blatantly cherry-picked those figures, why would you use the figure for 300m in-stream Google+ users, rather than the 540m figure? Even that is an underestimate, because Google serves ads to many more people than directly use its services.
Yes, but Google could still collect ad revenue on non-tracked users, they would just be restricted to the same kind of ads they use to target non-logged-in browsers. Obviously the ads within Gmail would be worthless on an untracked user - nix those. But the ads on the Google search pages? On sites that host AdSense (or whatever they call it now)? They would still have tremendous value.
I do wonder if this wouldn't break Google Now though.
It feels like the upper management at Google switched from being a tech-oriented company to a money oriented company. It's always been an ad agency, but the products used to be great. Now I have a hard time using their products, and EVERY SINGLE product I'mn still using is from lesser quality than 2 years ago.
While I hate this tactic of pushing monetization more obviously down our throats, what real option do they have? Amazon has slowly been eating their lunch in terms of product sales (heck, they even piggy back off of Google Ads and rake higher margins) and people are willingly telling Facebook what they like and dislike, so it seems that the end is nigh for advertiser spend primarily going to Google Search based ads. In this case, the pie of "eyeballs" getting bigger, advertiser spend isn't rising commensurately, and neither Google Search's share (they're both still rising, hence Google's recent stock boom). I'm not saying I have an answer, but nobody is really providing a viable alternative for them.
And with Google and Facebook screwing over their users with dark patterns, their demise was all set.
They will soon realize by finding it hard to recruit talent. Google and Facebook used to be the best companies to work at, nowadays you're starting to get looked at strangely if you work there.
What, you've been part of the NSA thing? What, did you work on G+? LOL was it you who redesigned youtube comments?
I'm still using gmail but I fear that one day they will do the same thing with new TOS on gmail. This day I even get prompted to create a g+ account every time I login.
Is there an alternative, where I would have 15GB and the option to use my own domain. I'll happily pay to avoid creating a g+ account and have decent space for my emails without managing the security.
Man thank you so much ! I didn't know they offered the option to use your own domain name. I will definitely give it a try since it's very affordable ($40/year in my case).
No problem! Hopefully you like it. So far I have nothing but good things to say about FastMail. They just had a big storage bump for all the different plans, which helps a ton.
Google created a dummy G+ account for my Youtube user recently. I had hard time reverting that, and just found a way to unlink Youtube from that G+ page. When I try to delete that G+ page, it warns me that it would nuke my corresponding Google Talk service (which I don't want to lose). This is very annoying. Is there a clean way to revert all this G+ nonsense without disturbing other services?
So without reading the terms of agreement bad stuff happens and then you complain? They told you it would happen yet you agreed. If you are not happy with those "tricks", then don't agree with the terms of agreement which you are supposed to READ before you agree with them.
Or do you sign any contract presented to you without hesitation?
Maybe change your perspective. Google is trying to integrate everything into one Google account.
Imagine if Github created the Wiki product with a separate login, and then wanted to integrated Wikis into the rest of Github, but then lots of Wiki haters got mad because they wanted the old Github and didn't want to sign-up for all that Wiki stuff.
The point is, if you sign up for Google, you get Drive, Docs, Spreadsheets, YouTube, and G+. They are different services that are all part of having a Google account.
The real thing you should be complaining about is that G+ notifications are annoying, and you just want to turn it off because you don't use G+.
That would be like if every time you logged into Amazon.com to watch an instant movie you got notifications from S3 saying your bill for the month is $0.00, or your workmate you gave access to your EC2 account just bought a new TV.
It's the notifications that are problem, not the integration.
Here's one thing holding me back from G+: Our gmail account is one that my wife and I share. It's our family email address. Call me old-fashioned, but the profile is neither a him nor her, and it isn't one person
The day they require G+ will be the day I transfer to Fastmail permanently.
Where's the beef? How have the terms of picasa changed? (That's a no-cost downloadable Mac and Windows software right?) Also what did s/he get notifications about? Does s/he mean some emails about ToS changes?
I really like the pricing of Google Apps. Flexible and not very costly. I wish they had kept free email with single user Google apps accounts (a requirement for appengine custom domains) though. Even something with a 10 mb inbox would have worked.
Google has played the long waiting game and has given users some excellent services for free(which has benefitted Google too). Now that the services are mature, they have to make sure that these services are self sufficient.
We have been in the age of entitlement for quite a while. I don't quite understand why more people just don't do instead of talking about doing. We all have things that we hate and annoy us but most deal with the issue and carry on. I feel that it is wrong that something gains notoriety simply because it is agreeable to a large consensus of people who feel the same way. What is the merit?
I think it is silly how every new feature or slight bug introduced by Google is viewed from negative standpoint. I guess Google is new Misro$oft.
But really, I wonder how many of those things are really to increase number of G+ users (I suspect quite a few), and how many are simple setting resets because of a bug/move to a new system with different setting encoding.
They can tie all this stuff together all they want -- it doesn't really matter to me. I use GMail and that's about it. I was on G+ for a bit - it's interesting - but I have too much time invested in Facebook to switch.
So, go ahead, change the ToS, Google. Things being what they are, I can still get thru the day without the pain of switching.
Can someone explain to my why creating a blank profile with Google Plus and not using it is so much worse than not creating a profile? It's not like you are sharing any more information with Google through the G+ UI vs GMail, or am I missing something crucial?
Presumably, you are using the G+ profile. Otherwise, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
What your blank G+ profile will do is connect your YouTube video views, with your Google Map searches, Google searches, GMail, and whatever else you do. If you log in to G+ on a cell phone in NYC, they will know it. Then you take your cell phone back home to SF, they will know that G+ profile was logged in from NYC and SF.
You're sharing the fact that you're the same person doing all these activities across various services, various locations, various times, various devices, and with various people.
I guess that implies that Google did not know this before. If you are logged into GMail, are you not logged into Maps at the same time?
Also, I believe you do not have to be logged into Maps on your mobile phone to use it.
Lastly, what are we worried about here? The NSA can figure out how to do a join between all the different databases Google has to uniquely identify you and Google will not ask you for consent on that. What Google is trying to do is combine the info from various services to get better targeted ads. Is that exactly a tragedy or an invasion of privacy? At the end of the day, no matter how they collect it, store it, organize it, or analyze it, you end up voluntarily giving them all the information. Don't want to do that? Sign out of YouTube.
I'm assuming it must still be more beneficial to Google to continue to press G+ on it's users than cease doing so, because even with all of the bad publicity they receive for it - they continue forward. Bummer.
This has very little to do with logging in with Chromium. Picasa was the first service to integrate with G+, they then allowed high resolution picture hosting and the like. This also has nothing to do with "maximizing profits" (at least not directly) it has more to do with phasing out Picasa web albums for G+ photos.
And if I remember correctly the new terms prompt does specifically mention G+ integration, and it has a 'dont accept' option.
The intent here is reasonable: They have dozens of services with dozens of comment engines and user-systems and they need to consolidate that crap into something more coherent. Picasa/YouTube do functionally similar services but one uses video and one uses pictures, so it makes sense for Google to try to make their common-ground more common.
The problem is that fundamentally, G+ was too opinionated and Google leadership was too polite. The relationship should've been the other way around - G+ needed to be more flexible (better support for anonymous/pseudonymous posting) while Google should've moved decisively instead of soft-peddling it so many times and breaking promises to the users that implied that they had a choice about these changes. You can't not-have Plus.
What they should've offered is "I don't want a Plus homepage" and "I don't want to participate in Circles" which is an agreement they could have honoured.