Today Google Plus offered me a customized URL - here's the catch...

...they wanted my mobile number to verify it... Why am I not surprised? Oh, yes, the ATS forum forms part of my daily reading matter. Thanks guys for the regular mind workout. And slowly, all the little puzzle pieces join up until a general picture forms.

reply to post by meridie


then keep a old mobile phone for all the stuff that you do not want them to know about in your life like your real phone number and just switch it on when you are waiting for the text to verify

What f's me off is every time I login to youtube it constantly asks me if i want to use my full name instead of my username.... No my decision has not changed since the last 25 times you asked me.

reply to post by homeslice


i hear ya. last week i tried to sign in after being gone from there for about 8 months, kept getting prompt to turn on cookies. i did, and it kept telling me i didn't. so i guess they read the nasty remark on my channel i left for them, about needing my real name. lol. so now i cant access my channel.




to the op, dont give them chit , they don't need it.

reply to post by meridie


if google was already " spying on you " to the extent that many claim - they already have your phone number

reply to post by meridie


They already have your mobile number to verify passwords. What the big deal. You can change a phone number in a half hour.

Booo... nah, just checking !

reply to post by meridie


I try to stay away from anything Google. I've quit logging into Youtube since Google bought it and changed the log-ins to use Google accounts. I've ditched Gmail back in 2008, Google Search has been replaced by DuckDuckGo the same year for me.

I really liked Google "back in the day". I remember getting a beta invite for Gmail and falling in love. I liked Google's policy of privacy and "do no evil". Yet, over the next couple of years during my use of Google, they quickly abandoned everything I once liked about them.

It's not that difficult to leave them behind. There are other alternatives that can become just as good if people will give them a chance.

Do you know these days its impossible to even get Google account without adding phone number. Yes, you read that right. Adding phone number is the only way to verify your account.

homeslice
What f's me off is every time I login to youtube it constantly asks me if i want to use my full name instead of my username.... No my decision has not changed since the last 25 times you asked me.

This drives me nuts!!

What happens when they want your real name to even continue?!

I have been having some issues with youtube.

comments I try to remove from my own video's won't be removed.

Comments not appearing on one of my videos.

Youtube is becoming glued with google plus is silly.

Google are forcing people to use there social media. The old youtube was much better and worked why force your users to use a social media site.
I refuse social media sites, they are silly and are only there for social control.

homeslice
What f's me off is every time I login to youtube it constantly asks me if i want to use my full name instead of my username.... No my decision has not changed since the last 25 times you asked me.

Quoted for truth. I avoid logging into Youtube just to avoid the question and rigamarole. At what point does it become harassment? The other thing that annoys me is the creation of a Google+ account for my youtube channel. Way to bolster the membership numbers of your failing social media site, Google....

reply to post by Auricom


I use StartPage. I had to get a gmail account to activate my android phone but I never use it (I already have enough email addresses and it's a pain trying to remember all the passwords, lol) and I stopped using google altogether about 2 years ago. I'm almost to the point of saying bye-bye to windows and moving to a more secure OS (Any suggestions?).

Thanks for the input, everyone. At the time I got the google plus account, the phone verification was not yet a requirement. I was involved with a start-up company for a mobile game (I was writing content for it) and one of the project leaders sent me the invite. Back then, google plus was still invitation only.

I've never been a fan of interlinked social media accounts. My accounts are mostly independent of each other and I don't necessarily duplicate posts. A little more than a year ago, though, youtube more or less compelled me to link that account with google plus. Soon after, something a little unnerving happened. Someone hacked into my account and deleted all my youtube comments on a certain music artist (who happens to be my favorite). Some of the comments went back several years (suggesting an acute attention to detail with the person/s in question), and none of them seemed in any way offensive to me. Was it a personal attack or was it a case that someone merely wanted my real name to 'not' come up? Or was it merely some obscure type of 'warning'? To this day, that remains a mystery and I'm not sure of the motive. Obviously my passwords were changed at the time, but I'm not sure if I can bring myself to be convinced of privacy. There has been no malicious activity since, though.

What is striking to me though is how attitudes (even my own) have changed over the erosion of personal privacy, compared to even a few years ago. Right now, I pretty much believe that privacy is a myth, regardless of what precautions you take.

reply to post by RedShirt73


I use a mix of operating systems. My primary machine(s) are OS X based. My Windows computers have Fedora 19 running on them. I'd give Fedora, Ubuntu or any other flavor of Linux a go. They're all good. (There are other Linux distro's that maintain a high security factor, but are overkill in my opinion.)

But you're still using Google via your Android phone. I've ditched my Android based phones and have gone back to using my old Nokia E7 and E72 (Symbian devices) for now. I'm hoping they either release a "Google-less" Android custom rom or that the Firefox OS for phones takes off and gives us a good alternative.

But unfortunately, people who value security are less and less these days. Kids who don't give a rats rear end about who watches them as long as they get their Facebook updates outnumber us which means things will get a lot worse before it gets better.

Some links:
fedoraproject.org...
www.linux.com... (This one has at least one secure Linux distro discussed.)
tails.boum.org... (Tails, a very secure and anonymous Linux distro.)

When I quit using my HTC Galaxy Note II recently, I didn't use Google at all for anything. A good example of what I did is outlined here: www.itworld.com...

I downloaded .APK apps bypassing Google Play entirely. For paid apps, some developers were more than happy to take a paypal payment and send the APK file via email. Others, concerned over piracy (and rightly so) denied. In those cases, I simply made do without.

reply to post by Auricom


I heard about an OS called "Liberté Linux". Any thoughts on this OS?

Liberté Linux

when you send regular mail, you sign it with your name. people using public email services should be expected to use their real names, and using a phone number to verify such account, isn't something evil, nor unexpected. actually, you get a bonus of increased security - noone without direct access to your phone can hack into your email account.

yet you all act like you feel insecure about google knowing your phone number (like they care - they won't use it for anything actually, unless it is linked with android dumbphone - but if you're using android, you've asked for it), but you don't give a damn about the real security of your email account.

noone forces you to share your data with them - wether you'll synchronize your smartphone contacts using gmail, giving them phone numbers of your family, wether you'll share your photos using picasa, wether you'll use anything else - it's all up to you. having to provide your phone number is justified though, when security comes to mind at least. and knowing that with access to your email account, random person can probably hack into all other your accounts, registered using that email address (social media, bank, paypal, whatever), you should do your best to protect it.

i'm not protecting google - i'm tired of their actions, but sadly, unless you have your own email server, there's no real alternative. try reading the privacy policies of other big email providers and you'll hopefully understand that they're no better. why the push for google+? because they want ad money, as much as facebook, that's obvious. i've considered switching to gmx, but after reading about many accounts being just locked/deleted because of some automatic scan, no thanks.

and if you don't want to use gmail and prefer some small, unreliable email provider instead, just go your way and stop crying out how bad and evil google is. all you do is complain, while actually doing nothing to keep your email account really secure. there are stupid people using google services blindly, there are even more naive people bashing google blindly while fooling themselves into thinking they've avoided the possible privacy leaks (there is no way to do this, other than staying offline), while compromising the security of their own email accounts - and telling others to do the same thing, and there are people aware of the risks, but also aware of the fact that there is no real alternative, and unless you're a server admin, and at the same time you can force all the people you're in contact with to avoid google and all the other companies with similar - or worse - policies, your privacy will be compromised, in one way or another. the only thing you can do while staying online, is to use your common sense and calculate the risks before doing anything.

otherwise you're just being stupid drama queens, doing everything to make not only your own email, but that of the others, more insecure, without actually increasing the privacy that concerns you so much.

and btw, nothing pisses me off more than people thinking they have the right to stay anonymous on the internet. it should be FORBIDDEN, because the humanity isn't grown up enough for such thing. people abuse it constantly, thinking they cannot be found, and that's the whole reason of online abuse, bullying, theft, lies and every other possible evil that you can find across the internet. you think your phone number is such a secret thing? how don't want to provide your real name as well? imagine, how many hoaxes would be posted on ATS by complete idiots when they would be forced to provide their real name - and possibly the general region they live in - in their profile? you want the answer? close to zero.

I got tired of having Google Chrome automatically installed like a virus every time I updated my Adobe Flash. I don't recall ever being asked if I wanted it or not. I had to then spend time going through and getting rid of it.

reply to post by ketsuko


you had to opt in for that, because i have flash player installed (with automatic updates on) and it never, ever, tried to install chrome. for clicking blindly 'ok'/'next' without reading the available options, you can blame yourself only, so stop spreading lies. uninstalling flash completely (together with chrome) and installing it again, while checking for the options available, should help (unless you'll download some chrome+flash bundle instead of NPAPI flash plugin version).

reply to post by jedi_hamster


I read everything when I install, and I don't ever recall being asked if I wanted it. It's the one thing that keeps getting stuck on my machine. Somehow I manage to avoid picking every other unwanted program that you have to opt in for.

reply to post by RedShirt73


the only way to get a 100% secure OS, is to download all the software (kernel, user space tools, apps) from their respective sources, possibly reviewing the source code yourself in case of any doubts, then compile it on your own (in reasonably secure environment - virus free and with safe compiler), building your system from scratch.

by downloading binaries from sources that you cannot possibly know, nor can you be 100% certain about their true intentions, in case of such things like that distro - you're asking for backdoors. what's the better way to spread a backdoored linux distribution other than to target it at the very people you want to go medieval against?