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Posts tagged "privacy"

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Daily Meh: The Case of the Haunted Avatar

Once upon a time, I got invited to join a group blog. Then the group blog published something I’d written, and the founder told me I should get an avatar for the blog. This was his suggestion:

I agreed. I’ve since come to dislike having this picture represent me, because it either sets the…

Yeah, when automattic bought gravatar, that seemed sort of inevitable. It never really occured to me how weird that could wind up being, though. My problem with gravatar has always been that it attempts to provide identity without authentication - I could impersonate anyone whose email address I know. Not to mention, most sites that ship your email to gravatar, don’t ask your permission to do so.

from Daily Meh

fleetfootedfox 19 Feb Tags privacy 7 Notes

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Google admits Buzz social network testing flaws

godsmokesparliaments:

This is why you test and test and test before release.

Of course, the problems they’re acknowledging are not the ones that are upsetting people. Those problems are considered core features, and will never go away.

“We think that integration with Gmail was absolutely the right way to go - we wanted to make Buzz easily accessible to people,”

from god smokes parliaments

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Text: Or, privacy is only “dead” for certain dudes in Silicon Valley who, coincidentally, make things like Buzz

melissa:

I use my private Gmail account to email my boyfriend and my mother.

There’s a BIG drop-off between them and my other “most frequent” contacts.

You know who my third most frequent contact is?

My abusive ex-husband.

Which is why it’s SO EXCITING, Google, that you AUTOMATICALLY allowed all my most frequent contacts access to my Reader, including all the comments I’ve made on Reader items, usually shared with my boyfriend, who I had NO REASON to hide my current location or workplace from, and never did…

Oh, yes, I suppose I could opt out of Buzz — which I did when it was introduced, though that apparently has no effect on whether or not I am now using Buzz — but as soon as I did that, all sorts of new people were following me on my Reader! People I couldn’t block, because I am not on Buzz!

Fuck you, Google. My privacy concerns are not trite. They are linked to my actual physical safety, and I will now have to spend the next few days maintaining that safety by continually knocking down followers as they pop up. A few days is how long I expect it will take before you either knock this shit off, or I delete every Google account I have ever had and use Bing out of fucking spite.

Fuck you, Google. You have destroyed over ten years of my goodwill and adoration, just so you could try and out-MySpace MySpace.

- Harriet Jacobs

from melissa gira grant

fleetfootedfox 12 Feb Tags bubble google privacy 53 Notes

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Text: Spain’s Goth First Daughters Embarrass, Embarrassed By Dad

sexartandpolitics:

As an ex-goth, this makes me smile.

“Here’s Barack and Michelle Obama with Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and his family. The State Department uploaded it to Flickr. (What an unlikely sentence!) Whoops—no one in Spain has ever seen Zapatero’s Goth daughters before! According to Zapatero, Spanish law allows him to prevent the Spanish media from running any photographs of his 16 and 13-year-old daughters Laura and Alba. For their privacy, see. And because maybe it would be considered weird for the PM to have goth daughters, but it totally shouldn’t be. It is a natural part of life, becoming a teenaged goth.”

Spain’s Goth First Daughters Embarrass, Embarrassed By Dad - Barack Obama - Gawker

this is silly and adorable, but I’ve stripped the photo so that Gawker can decide whether to continue publishing the photo.

from sex, art, and politics