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Google+ Photos To Be Separated From Google+
An anonymous reader writes "Speculation on the eventual shuttering of Google+ has once more risen with news that Google+ Photos will soon be developed and run separately from the social media site. This news follows observations that Google+ "was barely mentioned at Google I/O 2014, while there were 15 sessions dedicated to the service in 2013" and that the company has ended its controversial real name policy. Google Hangouts was also separated from Google+ at the end of July." I've actually heard several people praising Google+ lately; scaling it back to "just a social stream" probably fits into some kind of corollary to Murphy's Law.
De-plus youtube while you're at it... Fuck that noise.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
Until they come clean on what they're mining from your activities, I'd stay away from it.
What's to "come clean" about? Their privacy policy says they aggregate information about you from all your uses of their services. There you go. That's it. What else do you want to know? What they'll use it for? For providing you services, and for selling ads which they display to you.
Seems pretty obvious and straightforward to me.
(Disclosure: It's not really relevant to the content of my comment, but I'm a Google employee. I'm not, however, a Google spokesperson. The above is my own words and opinions only.)
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Good lord people. They use your information to display ads. Just like almost every other social network in existence. Clearly this isn't a sticking point for most people or Facebook would be a ghost town.
Problem for you? Fine don't use it, but it's not like it's a secret. For most people it's worth the conveniences Google provides to have their data mined. I know it is for me.
10 minutes working on a sig. What a waste.
You're not really using the Chromebook at all in that case, then. It's the servers you're connecting to using the web browser or ssh that do all of the real work. The Chromebook is, at best, a dumb terminal. But unlike a traditional dumb terminal, your dumb terminal may very well be sending information to Google that they then use when advertising crap to you.
I have seen regular people use a Chromebook, and they are not at all happy when they find out that it doesn't run Word, Excel, games, and other Windows or OS X apps they've bought. They're pretty pissed off when they find out that they're stuck using shitty web-based alternatives that rarely do what they need. And so they go out and buy a real laptop, which these days may only cost a couple of hundred dollars more than the Chromebook, but is far more capable.