[Nottingham] Google morphing into a pan-dimensional "facebook"?

[Martin]

On 26/01/12 23:02, Jason Irwin wrote:
> On 26/01/12 22:32, Martin wrote:
>> All for a beautiful harmony? Or a tranquil hegemony? Is this going
>> scarily intrusive?
> I think they are just trying to move all the various policies into one
> and to merge systems to save on resources. and Google has always been
> scarily intrusive.  When I was buying this place I did think "Do I want
> Google scanning emails to/from the lawyer?"  Explaining PGP would have
> been too much hassle (and I doubt Outlook can use it).

Surely you mean GPG?...

And that is one small part of the problem... Does the intrusion get
irksome or dangerous enough to then push everyone to encrypted
communications that then smashes convenience and internet performance?

I'm just waiting for some "Phorm"-style intrusiveness to give away some
embarrassing or confidential corporate details by the keywords filched
and acted upon... The are some scary possibilities...

There's also the fun of multiple people using the same web browser and
getting the previous user's adverts... "Highly selected and targeted"
can raise some fun possibilities for some time after...


> The only option I can see is to run one's own mail server.

Yep... I'm getting ever more motivated to go to the hassle of doing
that. Easy enough but quite onerous to maintain a reliable 24/7 presence.


> And status.net instance.
> And ownCloud.
> And...aww heck, just put a server farm in the shed!

All rather irksome and inefficient and wasteful individually and so...


> back to square one.  Well, maybe square two.

Freedom cooperatives with their own servers and services?

Are there enough of us to hire say three "NLUG" hosts in three different
datacentres?


> Oh, and for those of us on Virgin Media if you use you virginmail
> account; that's Google.

Yes...


> And here's a thing I discovered - if you change Virgin accounts your
> email address remains "locked" to the old account and can never be used
> again.  You have to give Virgin a totally new email address to get bills
> etc. as it is used for sign-on and they do not accept "+" in the
> address.  PITA.

And a whole new level of bureaucracy...


1984?

You do have a webcam on your mobile/ePad/netbook/laptop/desktop?...

Cheers,
Martin

-- 
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Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
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