Skip to main content

Shahrukh Khan wants to follow me on Google Buzz

Yesterday, Google Buzz notified me that Shahrukh Khan wants to follow me. Of course, given Buzz's default action, he already was following me, that is, until I blocked him!

Shahrukh Khan following me! Doesn't that seem absurd. When a celebrity tries to follow a nobody, the nobody has to be really pig-headed to allow the celebrity to follow him. I mean, it should be obvious to the nobody that the celebrity profile is actually fake.

I took some pains to check out Shahrukh Khan's profile. It had 130 odd followers and followed 1300. Weird, isn't it, considering that at the time of publishing this blog, he follows 49 and is followed by 798,768 people on twitter? Further, his profile had a single post on Buzz, a picture of him taken out of some glossy, with the text My new look for Don2

So, what obvious steps did I take besides blocking him? I also reported the profile to Google as a fake. It is obvious that someone is using some kind of a crawling script to follow random people. I wonder why? Does he hope to get some random titbits of people's lives? Does he possibly try and harvest email ids of people to spam them? Or does he just want to prove the gullibility of the people who allow him to follow them? I can only make a guess.

I have long wanted to write about the flawed privacy policy followed by Google, and the hazards of having a one-id-for-all-services service.

With Google Buzz, it was compulsory to have a public profile, which anyone on the net could see. Here, thankfully, Google gave us two options. Either have your username in your profile url, or have an obscure string/number hash in the profile url. It's a lose-lose both ways.

I have chosen the url of this blog the way it is, because it makes sense. I want my profile to make sense too. I want that anyone who wishes to see my profile can be given an easy-to-remember url. However, I do not want my email id to be my url. That would invite loads of spam.

Buzz makes crawling for email addresses easier. I can go to any random person's buzz, there check the list of people he is following, check if their profiles have a proper name or if their profiles are random numbers. This way, I have a reasonable amount of email ids using a crawling script. Or I could go in further, and check all the comments on a person's post by his followers/friends, and harvest their email ids too. By the idea of six degrees of separation, I could, in principle I would need a depth 6 recursion to go through everybody's profiles.

And again, there is the annoying policy of follow-by-default-unless-I-block-you. This means that people may end up following me without my knowledge. No harm there, you may say, considering that my Buzz is public on the web anyway, nevertheless, I consider it a breach of privacy.

People who have been following my blog for some time would have noticed that I have recently added a subscribe-via-email option. Why did it take me so long to put that option in? That is because my feeds are delivered via feedburner, and it has a nasty way of putting in my email id as the sender of the mail. This would mean that again, my email id would not be private any longer. This clearly was unacceptable.

It took me some time to contemplate whether or not to create a new id, so as to connect my feeds with that id. I figured that there would hardly be any subscribers to my blog, and those would generally be friends or people that I know. Nevertheless, I could not be too sure, and hence I ended up with two email ids and no subscribers-via-email.

If only Google would have allowed my email id to not be on the emails sent via my blog, they might have saved 7000 odd MB of disk space.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

ERROR_SUCCESS

ERROR_SUCCESS. This macro would be familiar to all those who have done some programming in WIN32. It is the output of the GetLastError() function to check the thread's last error state when no error has occurred. Weird, isn't it? I mean, if it is a success, then why is it marked as an error in the macro? This is one example of a badly made API. APIs are considered bad when programming in them becomes non-intuitive. Software is said to be bad (or said to suck) when it seems counter-intuitive to the user. There is one very simple example of this. Start notepad. Type in any text. Click on close. The message that you see is: This makes no sense to me as a user. Of course, the programmer follows the approach that he creates a temporary file called Untitled , and in that file he allows the user to make all his changes. But how am I, as a user to understand that? A similar disconnect occurs even between two different programmers. That is why it takes a whole lot of effort to make

On Harry Potter and why I dislike the series

There could not be a better time for this post. There could not have been a worse time for this post. Now that the penultimate movie of the series is out, and my facebook wall filled with people who loved the movie. But this is something I really wanted to say, and I shall say it anyway. Harry Potter is pathetic literature. Now, you must be wondering why I say that. There are many reasons. Firstly, the storyline itself is flawed. When a writer sits down to write anything, he/she must set up some essential rules about what is happening. These rules must remain constant irrespective of how many times he/she changes his/her mind. This is so that the readers are allowed to have some sensibility in what they are reading. In the fourth book, Rowling goes ahead and kills Cedric. Then, at the end of the book, the horseless carriages are there again. Nothing special. We all knew that they are horseless. But then comes the fifth book, and BAM, the horses are actually winged beasts that only thos

Elements of a Story: The Whispers

I'm compelled to begin each post with a meta. That way, my blog posts seem less like essays or dissertations, and more like diary entries, or web logs. So here goes... I started this blog a little over a year ago. The main purpose of this blog was to experiment with styles of writing, and find an effective outlet for all the subjects I wish to rant about; saving my classmates the agony of having to listen to them. As I wrote this blog, I've experimented with so many styles, and have received comments claiming that my work is a shameless copy greatly inspired by so-and-so author/work. Fact is that I simply chanced upon that style. I read, so obviously, my work shall reflect the styles of those I admire, but I've worked out so many styles without even knowing that they exist, only to be informed of them later. Recently, I've been struck with the seeming absence of whispers as an element of a story. The more I've thought of the subject, the more I've been convince