Once SMS is turned on you get a message on top of the screen informing you what identity will be used, can't seem to find a screen shot of that (probably since people don ' way to publicise that info).
You appear to be extrapolationg your experience of an OS on a device with a bunch of accounts to her experience of a differently installed OS on a different device with different accounts. Then you appear to be saying that she is wrong and that it's her fault.
Part of the problem is the lousy quality of journalism. From reading TFA we can't know what actually happened. But if you know what happens on simillarly installed OSs and accounts it'd be great if you could present a clear wallthrough.
At the moment you seem to be making irrelevant points.
It's certainly not Google's fault, either, if someone flashes a third party "mod" ROM to their device that may or may not have had disclaimers and EULAs removed, any more than it's Adobe's fault that I didn't see a claus in the EULA claiming my firstborn because I didn't buy Photoshop but instead pirated it, and the pirates replaced the EULA with an ad for their 0-day warez site.
No it didn't, it might have been created when you joined something that required it and there was a check mark somewhere, it gets populated by stuff that you added when you started Google account like date of birth etc, but you get presented with that as well.
I'm the kind of person that explores all menu options and such in software to make sure it doesn't run/install anything I don't want. When signing up for services online, I go through all the settings. I even occasionally go through my Gmail settings to make sure nothing has changed.
Maybe it was "designed" to give me an option, but I never had an option. Gmail isn't bug-free either. Over the years I've run into a few bugs. Occasionally the link for the inbox shows I have unread mail, but there is none. I'm able to fix it by doing a search for unread mail, and the link changes showing that I don't have any unread mail.
> I even occasionally go through my Gmail settings to make sure nothing has changed.
Yeesh. It's stuff like this that makes me glad I run my own mail/CalDAV/CardDAV server, and am thus free to use throwaway accounts for all of my interaction with Google.
I wonder if there'd be any interest in an old-fashioned HOWTO that starts with a freshly imaged VPS and goes through the whole setup process. It's been a few years since I set everything up, but I've been planning to redo it on a fresh box anyway, and writing the HOWTO wouldn't add much effort.
I think that's a good idea. I know I'll be looking for some examples in a couple of months when I have enough time to dedicate setting one up properly.
You may or may not have seen it already, but in case you haven't, I'll link here the "How to NSA-proof your email" howto [1] someone just posted in the "Gmail was down" thread. Regardless of how you feel about the Black Chamber, it's an excellently well-written document on setting up your own mail-serving VPS using postfix and dovecot; the filesystem-level encryption stuff is trivially severable, and constitutes about 80% of what I'd have written (but not as well) had I not found this first. The other 20% would be setting up Baïkal for CalDAV/CardDAV service, but that's pretty straightforward and well described in the Baïkal Github repo.
(Minor quibbles about the HOWTO: I'm not sure Solr is really necessary; Dovecot seems to give me full-text search for free via IMAP. Also, I tried Z-push and it worked, but didn't support message flags, which I require, and I got tired of push pretty fast anyway. It works, and might've added message flags in the years since I tried it, but it's by no means required. Still, an excellent document, which I unreservedly recommend.)
Actually, when I created a disposable gmail account a couple of years ago, it came with google plus already active. I deleted that part, of course, but I never signed up for it.
I love the implication that having something auto-opt you into something and then doing it is the same thing as voluntarily doing it. Like we're supposed to be ok with the companies we do business with behaving like evil genies.
Even if people don't have a google+ account (even if they don't have a gmail account), do you really think google aren't building a profile with as much personal data as they can collect?
With all respect, I don't use Googles services anymore myself, but your posts in this thread have been as... partisan, for lack of a better term, as the person you claim is a "Google employee". You're just on different sides of that.
Well screaming like a (anti)fanboy doesn't fit in with HN's discourse, and will make the majority of people dismiss what you have to say. That's as shame, as I actually agree with you on this topic somewhat.
But to answer you, so the casual reader does not get confused, you get a Google+ account when you use gmail or youtube or pretty much any other google service.
I know that from personal experience! I got that screen I link to, then another notice poped-up telling me what identity I'm currently using, I'm searching for a screen cap of that.
So your anecdote says you had one experience and hers says she had a different experience. Whose are we to believe as authoritative? Is it not possible that software has different results for different people based on a wide variety of settings, most of which are not visible to the end user?
