Flutterby™! : Thanks for nothing, jerkface

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Thanks for nothing, jerkface

2014-06-08 14:33:27.673295+00 by Dan Lyke 3 comments

Violet Blue goes off on Sergey Brin and Google+.

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: made: 2014-06-08 15:50:40.891131+00 by: meuon [edit history]

Yeah, while I admit my Note III and Android is awesome, on my list is:

  1. A non-connected to anything good camera. Watching Google "auto-backup" my images and make photo albums about my trips could be really bad. I sometimes take picture of things for my purposes that the client or my would not want shared on the internet.
  2. A very dumb phone. My Nokia N900 was the last phone I trusted, but I have some other older basic phones I should resurrect.
  3. A computer/media server WITHOUT an internet connection.

Understanding that I share a LOT of things most people would think of as embarrassing, please understand that such sharing is MY choice, and not to be automated. I am sometimes involved in things that, without proper context and information, are not things that should end up on G+ or Facebook.

I was thinking about BBS's the other day, and realizing that a lot of the power of the BBS community came from the possibility of anonymity, and the ability to create and maintain an avatar/persona that might be nothing like who you really are, or might be a very special part of you, deep inside. The internet is losing that power.

#Comment Re: made: 2014-06-08 16:46:50.770093+00 by: ebradway

I'd love to see Google Hangouts get decoupled from SMS on Android and GTalk. Ever since getting my Nexus 5, I tend to call people when I want to send them a text message. And we use GTalk at work, which has been broken for anyone attempting to use anything other than GTalk as a client.

#Comment Re: made: 2014-06-09 16:28:44.430097+00 by: Dan Lyke

I use TextSecure for my SMS, does that get coupled to Google Hangouts in some weird way?

I have turned off Google+ on my cell phone.

There have been (and probably still are) pictures of me naked on the 'net, my blog has been very revealing over the years, my home address and phone number are on the first or second Google hit for my name, so, like Meuon, I'm not one to worry too much about the sharing of a lot of things (except for things like pictures of client installations), but...

There's something about the deceptive coercive sharing that's happening of late that's starting to bug me a lot. I uploaeded a video to YouTube with an unlisted URL yesterday, for two people to see, but hesitated, because I no longer knew where the various tools involved might try to spew the link.

And, yeah, I'm trusting my hardware less and less...