The INQ: Always giving more than you really wanted
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Google's security and privacy are not good enough
A US UNIVERSITY has said that Google's commitment to privacy and security doesn't meet its standards.
According to Information Week, Gmail failed a University of California at Davis evaluation as the official e-mail program for its 30,000 faculty and staff members.
UC Davis' CIO Peter Siegel, academic senate IT chair Niels Jensen, and campus council IT chair Joe Kiskis said the school decided to end its Gmail pilot because faculty members doubted Google's ability to keep their correspondence private.
Many faculty "expressed concerns that our campus's commitment to protecting the privacy of their communications is not demonstrated by Google and that the appropriate safeguards are neither in place at this time nor planned for in the near future," the letter said.
Google insists that its privacy controls are adequate, although it admits that there are lots of opinions and voices on campuses.
The University of California report cited a recent letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt from the privacy commissioners of ten countries, including Canada, the UK, and Germany that slammed the outfit for its recent addition of Google Buzz to Gmail.
Buzz adds social networking tools that the commissioners said compromise user privacy.
However Google pointed out that Buzz was not part of the Gmail package under evaluation at UC Davis.
UC Davis said that "outsourcing e-mail may not be in compliance with the University of California Electronic Communications Policy", which forbids the university from disclosing or examining the contents of emails without the account holder's consent and from distributing emails to third parties. µ
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Hey 'crusher' it's not a deception if you have to read it outlined clearly in an EULA and agree to that to get gmail, look up the word deception please.
Everybody knows the reason gmail is free is that you allow them to scan it for ad purposes, that's your payment for it.
It's bad enough that people don't read or even scan over EULA but to then act like they discovered some secret when somebody tells them what's in it is a bit daft.
As for ISP, if you have a european ISP they will be forced to log all addresses and headers and IP's of devices accessing it of your email for years and supply that to any old cop that asks for them, that's the same EU that forces that as that claim google isn't private enough, makes you laugh.
Mind you google has servers in all european countries and direct your traffic there, so the same logging and accessing is true for google email accounts in europe.
Basically all email is semi-public unless you encrypt it (however google's EULA does not allow encryption, but they don't check that well though).
Google is one of the biggest data miners in the world, right up there with FaceBook, except FaceBook does the deception differently.FaceBook changes the rules in the middle of the game. People have forgotten the old cliche "You get what you pay for. Bottom line is if its free you usually don't have a leg to stand on. If you pay your isp per month for services, such as Email,they are held accountable for breaches in the system. I have google for my junk mail and my Isp gets the legit.
Exactly!
I'm still waiting on Google to fix a problem that I have reported about a year ago. Google's help system is horrible. In the first or second step it seems in my opinion they try and tell you what problem you have instead of listening of what the problem really is. Seems Google only listens to those who could affect their bottom line or market share. I for one, am glad someone is actually standing up to them. To bad Google's CEO chose to blow them off as well instead of addressing the problem. Sad, very sad.