Apparently Google+ CAN Mess With Your Android Phone: My Bad

[catsittingstill]

If your G+ profile gets banned or deleted, you lose everything you bought in the Android Market.

So glad I have a pay-go phone.

Article on the problem here

Comments

[herlander_refugee]

Wow, I'm glad I have an i-phone.

[catsittingstill]

This would be a bad time to be a 'nym on Google+ and have an Android phone. (Though even the Android phones--my understanding is you lose your apps but keep the rest of your phone service. But I'm waiting to see how this plays out.)

Any other combination is less bad, depending on how badly loosing access to Google+, Google Reader, and Picasa would affect you.

Everybody's going to be different on that point. But I'm glad I don't use Picasa and use Google Reader very little. Otherwise I'd just be bowing out of Google+ now in the hopes that they wouldn't destroy my profile with the other services.

[herlander_refugee]

I deleted my own Google profile as soon as they announced that G+ would be 'real names only' and that all profiles would be public.

Screw that noise. I'm a grouchy old broad who has had about enough of corporations acting like I am a shopping serf who has to kowtow to their needs.

[catsittingstill]

Very reasonable thing to do. I may yet go that route myself; I haven't decided whether I'd rather follow a friend of mine when she leaves over the issue in September (if they haven't fixed it) or make them go to the time and effort of banning me.

If I'm going to be product, I will damn well be product on my own terms.

[herlander_refugee]

If I'm going to be "product"? I'd like to be a dose of salts. Or possibly castor oil.

[catsittingstill]

:-) as in "going through the system like"?

[herlander_refugee]

Indeed!

[randwolf]

This isn't only a Google thing: it is customary internet business practice. Signing up for cell service requires personally identifying information. Apple requires a credit card and the same identifying information for access to the iTunes store.

There's been plenty of warning about this: cypherpunks and privacy advocates have been talking about it since 1990. It's going to be hard to change.

[keris]

Certainly any phone or ISP company requires identifying information. However, the problem with Google is that it's all interrelated -- losing your G+ profile (or worse your gmail address) means losing Android apps, documents, email, as well as G+. This is the problem in generally with the much-pushed "single ID" idea, the more things you pile on one ID the more you have to lose if it is compromised.

Contrast this with the situation traditionally, where I had phone service from one supplier, mobile from another, internet from a third. Losing any one of those meant that I still had the others, and (if I was sensible) one password getting compromised didn't afect the others.

This is why I opposed the UK's ID scheme, in order to work it would have been tied into everything, so one error could block you from banks, health care, work, communication and even transport.

[randwolf]

It's a good point, but only because previously it was illegal to create such a unified service. Without the no-longer enforced anti-monopoly laws, ATT might have done it sooner in the USA.

And, you know, for surveillance purposes it doesn't matter. All the companies sell their data to the same data mining firms in the USA. The data miners and the security agencies link data across disparate services anyway, and if a government agency wants to shut down services across a file, they issue orders to multiple firms, and do so. That is why "real" names are so important to Google and Facebook, and why name collisions are so much a problem.

There is in principle no reason why handheld devices could not be independent computers, secured. But without laws to make it so, it is going to be a long struggle.

[catsittingstill]

My personal worry regarding G+ is not so much the government, but people.

The US is pretty far gone, but not so far gone that the government is persecuting atheists, or women who speak out of turn on gender issues, or just random women because they feel entitled.

But I can see the worries about too much power concentrated in the hands of government also. That's just a less immediate worry for someone in my position.

[randwolf]

I don't think the corporate abuses and the governmental abuses are separate. There is at least indirect governmental pressure though the data miners for Google to adopt its policies: there may also be direct pressure.

And--you know!--there is extensive government persecution of women and atheists at the state and local level. There are not direct prosecutions any more, but much law and legal and policing practice cuts against both groups. This is even to some extent so at the Federal level.

Croak!

[catsittingstill]

You lose your Android apps. As I understand it you don't lose your gmail, though. I have not heard either way about your Google Docs, but suspect you don't lose them (a guess, admittedly, based on the way they are bundled with your e-mail)

I agree about the shortcomings of a "one ID system." Right now, if I lose my driver's license, at least I still have my passport and my birth certificate to show to get a new one. And if I have a screwup with my mobile service, at least I have a landline and can still arrange payments with my bank.

[catsittingstill]

It's customary business practice to know where the money for the phone is going to come from. It may even be required (after 9-11) for the company to have the legal name of the person who owns the phone.

The issue here is the requirement to connect that phone name to the Google+ name or lose apps that you have bought.

Which is particularly ironic since Google+ promises "data liberation"-- you're supposed to be able to take your data with you if you leave the service instead of using your legal name.

[randwolf]

Oh, I see.

BTW, as far as I know, it is not permitted to lease cell service without ID. When my identity was stolen, it was used to set up a cell phone account.

[catsittingstill]

I didn't realize you had had your identity stolen.

I assume the cell phone account was shut down promptly when you straightened things out?

[randwolf]

The user never paid their bills, and it was six months before the account was shut down. I first found out about it, years later, when I received a collection letter.

I wrote about it on LJ, and you commented on the first post. It was resolved, but it was a near thing; I wrote about it here. At the time I remarked: that "The credit bureaus and collection agencies are acting as a de facto legal system. They are not subject to such niceties as legal standards of evidence: under some circumstances one is assumed guilty and must prove innocence." This seems also true in many areas where one does business with very large corporations: in default of governance, the corporations act as governments, creating and enforcing their own laws.

[catsittingstill]

I had forgotten, I'm sorry. And I think I may have missed the second post entirely.

But I'm very glad you got it cleared up (and very surprised someone could use a cell phone for six months without paying; I knew perfectly well it is possible to track that kind of thing very closely because my pay-go phone starts whining to be topped up ten days before it runs out of service. That's one of its less endearing characteristics.)

[randwolf]

I think the cell phone company plans on collecting that debt, regardless of its validity. Probably, they succeed a fair bit of the time: not everyone can produce the documentation the collection agency demands and not everyone can find out how to fight them.

[djbpeek]

Last time I needed to create an Apple iTunes account it let me use a prepaid iTunes card, although the way it's worded does make it look like you have to use a credit card.

[catsittingstill]

Hmm. An iTunes account is different; among other things it is tied to a particular computer and the phone is "validated" because it hooks up to that computer.

I had a great hard drive lobotomy last winter and now a "new" iTunes account. I found a third party program to rescue my music, but my apps will go as soon as I let my computer back them up on my iPod Touch--which works like an iPhone. I will probably eventually let it happen but don't want to loose Ocarina and Weatherbug.

[djbpeek]

Currently you can have apps from multiple accounts on an ipod or phone (this may change with ios5) but if you still have the username and password of the old account you can load the associated apps on up to IIRC 5 devices.

[catsittingstill]

O RLY?

That is cool. Must look into that; currently backing up calendar and contacts and music (by hand only) but would love to back up apps too.

Thanks for bringing this up!

[randwolf]

That's good to know. I wonder if one can do it entirely on purchased cards?