changed address
Loads of places take your payment without notifying you that your address did not pass AVS and the bank processes it without query.
14 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Apr 2010
photos are not the same as contact information - a very poor comparison from FB.
If a freind on face book has allowed their contact details be shared with you (ie shown on their fb page) then it is fair game for you to take a copy of those contact details? Yes in my opinion.
In which case what is the difference between copying data you are allowed to and copying lots of data you are allowed? none, except FB will not allow the second option as a feature. Why? Lockin.
fact is you need the email address & name of your contacts in gamil, so that you can whitelist those addresses (quite why google does not have bettrer spam protection is perhaps a different story).
I quit facebook, one of the reasons was that I could not get all the contact data my friends were sharing with me in any sort of reasonalbe way.
Now ms office has this intergration with social networks to get contact details (I read this on theregister some months back) - I am guessing the author forgot this avenue of contact data movement and perhaps it is a financial deal with MS or morelikely just a screen scrape.
It is utterly rediculous that data you can view and copy and paste and has been explicitly (I think we can assume this with a very high degree of certainty) been shared with you by your friends, yet you cannot populate or update your off/on line contacts system with that data. This is what computers are for and it is a trivial feature, nay essentail feature for what is in effect a glorified contact database (facebook).
The author goes to great pains to paint the picture of monstrous companies with nefarious thoughts in mind when it comes to users data, when in fact the issue is really with usability of systems and the lockin of users for the gain of advertising dollars and related activities (and no I dont mean that often touted bs of facebook/google selling your date to advertisers - bar the exception recently of fb identity code leakage/exploitation)
seriously, send a newsletter out and see how many conversations appear, many of them.
next they need to fix:
allow domains to be white listed
do not file email from ppl on address book in spam folder
better spam filtering.
show in inbox the addresses not in the address book.
free advice to google here:
1) make conversation view optional (it is a truely borked feature)
2) autocreate a whitelist from contacts (probably does this, but would be nice to be sure)
3) Show email which are not in contacts (a truely trivial feature to implement)
4) use better spam filters (like 6 dnsbl chained together (not forgetting to use whitelists) plus other measures). They must see spam very clearly with that many inboxes...