Spontaneous ∂erivation

And after I spent time trying to get my Tea site hooked up to it, too. Oh well.

By the way, simply turning it off won’t work. See these instructions from cnet.

Also, you probably have to accept that Buzz will get you whether you opt-out or not, because Google is determined to beat out Facebook and Twitter at their own game, even when running several furlongs behind.

I’m not a graybeard, but even I could tell them that trying to catch the competition is no way to beat the competition. The way to beat the competition is to find a niche where they aren’t.

I’m still using other Google products, though. Their TOS’s haven’t gone bat-crazy over insisting on geolocation status, and you can turn off sending debug information in Chrome. For now, anyways.

Up until yesterday I was somewhat cautiously using the Buzz Mobile App to post Buzz updates from my iPhone.

This morning I found, when trying to post, that I was being asked to agree with a TOS wherein, among other things, it stated that my current location would be displayed whenever I posted to buzz via the Mobile App.

And there was no way to opt out of it, unlike with Twitter and many of the Twitter apps. Or, hell, Facebook even.

My favorite quote from above: “Consent to the collection, use, sharing, and onward transfer of your data, including but not limited to voice and location data….”

Some of that I’ve always understood in Google apps before, because if you don’t allow them to store your data, they can’t do anything for you. On the other hand, I’ve never seen a Google app TOS before where they didn’t let you hide information that they didn’t need to get the job done. Like location when I’m not trying to use Google Maps.

The thing that worries me is if Google was already doing this, but hadn’t thought up the warning until this morning.

As y’all may know, while I do advertise my location as “Bainbridge Island, WA”, that’s one thing versus the GPS-triangulated location of the street corner I happen to be at. I have stalkers on my tail, and as such I do not post my precise geo-location on every Tweet.

Even Apple understood that, and let me turn off location services when I take pictures, wherein they don’t insert geo-location into my JPGs, and I don’t upload a YouTube of me throwing their iPhone through the wall. In fact, Apple let me turn off location services entirely, only to be turned on with the appropriate dialogs when other iPhone apps asked for it. A polite “no” didn’t freak out most non-map apps. I mean, why does an I-Ching program really care about where you are anyways? Or a camera?

It’s a simple arrangement.

Not simple enough for Google, apparently.

Yes, I do have a filter on my privacy. Some things I’d like to make public. Some things I want to keep private (it takes extra money to do so at times, but it’s doable). If a service refuses to let people make that nuanced distinction outside of “well, just don’t use us then!”, that’s either pretty damn arrogant or pretty damn lazy.

Google, you may intend no evil, but that doesn’t mean evil is never a result.

I’m waxing extremely nostalgic right now.

So here’s a page about themes I used to use.

This goes back to arachnejericho.com days, before I found out that I needed to pry my domain name out of GoDaddy/Google’s cold, dead hands when I switched away from Blogger.

(And then I decided to use something else instead. I’ll probably never be able to get my domain name back, and really, I could care less about it at this point.)

See GMail Account Hacking Tool at Hungry-Hackers.com.

Basically, you need to go to your settings page, scroll way down to the bottom, and find this:

Make sure that Always use https is checked, and click on Save Changes.

If you can’t find this page, here’s a visual guide:

Top of GMail home page

Bottom of Settings Page

“Gosh,” you may think, “but I always use Gmail under https!” Well, actually, you didn’t. And this option? Only introduced by Google in the past week. Previous to that, all GMail users were vulnerable to this hack, even if they thought they weren’t, and there was no way to prevent it.

Google, don’t you remember your “we won’t be evil” promise?