Google improves their protection scheme

Warning: Rant

Highly ****ed off at Google right now.

Moved all my stuff into GSuite and then learned that a number of Google’s products can’t be purchased by a GSuite account, only a free account.

How stupid is that?

Now thinking about how many hours it will take to yank all the mail, files, and music back out of Google to move them to other providers. Not liking the numbers.

Example: You can invite ANYONE anywhere with ANY email address to join Google Play Family Music under your family account...

UNLESS. Their domain is hosted in GSuite.

GSuite (paid) Support’s answer for this?

“That is not in our scope”.

LOL. Well then eff off. I’ll yank all three vanity domains back out of GSuite and go send the email money to one vendor, the disk money to another, and the music money to Amazon or Spotify. And it’ll be cheaper than GSuite.

Maybe then it’ll be “in your scope”, you idiots.

I could care less if they just added access dongles. Have had those in the corporate world for a long long time. Google Authenticator works fine for that without carrying around another piece of hardware.

Glad I learned about the GSuite problem before I went Android. People who learn about it too late and have paid apps associated with their vanity domain GSuite logins, have no way to transfer them to other Google accounts. When you shut down GSuite the account and all the purchases go away.

Been that way apparently since December of 2015 and nobody knows why. And Google doesn’t appear to be interested in fixing it.
 
You are the product, not the customer.

Yeah I figured that out, even though you pay for GSuite.

Recently I asked someone which NSA listening device they would put in their home, Google Home or Amazon Echo.

Their response was fitting...

“Amazon wants to sell you ****, Google wants to sell you. What do you think?”
 
Don't get me started...

I've found Google to be an unavoidable evil that is best managed by minimization and compartmentalization.

For example, I use an Android phone. But it's associated with a Google account that is used for nothing other than the phone. Using the rather granular permissions afforded by Nougat, I've also disabled or denied permissions to as much as Google's spyware as possible, and replaced the services I actually need with third-party apps that shun Google's servers (K9 for mail, TomTom for navigation, etc.). Google Play Services still needs to run and is an enthusiastic data gatherer, but the data is of limited usefulness because I never use that Google account for anything else and have disabled location history, search history, custom ads, and so forth in that account.

Yes, this is a compromise. It's minimization and compartmentalization rather than elimination. It also mean sacrificing some functionality that the phone is capable of providing if I allowed it to. I can yell "Okay Google" at my phone all day, for example, and nothing will happen. C'est la vie.

I also have a gmail account that I use for business purposes. The only entity I correspond with on that account is Google. I figure if they're the correspondent, they already know what's in the mail, so they can go ahead and read it if they like.

They still manage to track me. They have at least a dozen ways of doing that. My friend Ari and I sat down and figured them out a few years ago over a couple of bottles of cheap red wine, and I'm sure that there are some that we missed. But again, it's about minimization and compartmentalization. That's the best anyone can really hope for these days. Unless you want to always use a virgin browser on a proxy in a sandboxed user account on a virtual machine or a bootable Linux, the best you can do is minimization and compartmentalization.

I also have a "Track Me Not" extension on Firefox on a machine that's not proxied. It runs random Google searches on equally random and irrelevant questions every thirty seconds or so, just to muddy the waters and keep Google guessing about what I'm really interested in. (That probably explains some of the bizarre video recommendations I get on the rare occasions when I use YouTube.)

Here's an interesting thing that Ari and I found out: If you try to access Google Search using a virgin browser that's never been opened before, on a brand-new machine (or a bootable Linux), using a known anonymizing proxy provider, and without logging into a Google account, Google will not let you search. Instead, you'll get an error message stating that your IP has been sending suspicious packets. But if you keep the browser open and surf the Interwebs for a few minutes, then go back to Google Search, it will work.

The best Ari and I could conjecture is that if Google has absolutely no information about you and knows you're on a proxy, it won't even let you search. Once you've surfed the Web for a while, however, it has a little bit of user history about you (probably gleaned from Analytics, jQuery, Fonts, etc.), so it will let you run a search.

I've come to view Google as the online version of Toddo Marino, a powerful Genovese family capo de regime in the neighborhood where I grew up in Brooklyn. We all knew who he was, what he did, what he was capable of doing, and who his men were. We also knew to avoid interacting with them as much as possible, and to be very careful when we couldn't avoid interactions.

Toddo was a very outwardly kind, generous, and sometimes useful man. But he was first and foremost a mobster, and as such, a man best avoided whenever possible. That pretty much sums up Google, too, as far as I'm concerned.

Rich
 
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