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What's up with Google ?

A

AirCatHeavy

Well-Known Member
Seems every time I turn around, I find where Google tries to take control over every aspect of everything.

Latest discovery....

When you set up GMail on your phone, you can't even set up the Polling frequency.

It's like Google decides for you every step of the way what YOUR preferences are going to be and you're stuck with that.

The Geeks at Google are like Fun Police....or worse :mad:
 
Gmail doesn't poll. It pushes to your phone. Whenever you receive a new email in Gmail, it instantaneous pops up on your phone, so you don't have to wait for the next polling interval before you are notified of an email. Also, push email uses less power as the phone doesn't have to periodically check even if you have no new emails.

Is there a reason why you don't want to be notified immediately that you have received email and rather wait until the next polling interval?
 
AirCatHeavy said:
Seems every time I turn around, I find where Google tries to take control over every aspect of everything.
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Flawed reasoning. As stated above gmail is push. That has nothing to do with "Google trying to take control over every aspect of everything". If you really believe that conspiracy theory then you should try using iOS.

If you set up polling intervals then you're no longer using push. Polling only applies to pull. Pull is less efficient that push and will waste battery life.

If you still insist on establishing polling intervals then use an app that allows you to specify them and set up your gmail account as POP. Note that you'll have to deal with all the cons associated with POP accounts.
 
takeshi said:
Flawed reasoning. As stated above gmail is push. That has nothing to do with "Google trying to take control over every aspect of everything". If you really believe that conspiracy theory then you should try using iOS.

If you set up polling intervals then you're no longer using push. Polling only applies to pull. Pull is less efficient that push and will waste battery life.

If you still insist on establishing polling intervals then use an app that allows you to specify them and set up your gmail account as POP. Note that you'll have to deal with all the cons associated with POP accounts.
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Honestly, I could have left the Google comment out. That was probably just frustration from finding one more thing Google does it's way rather than allowing me to do it the way I feel is best for me. I also mistakenly thought I HAD to have the Gmail account active, but as pastafarian pointed out (in a courteous manner), was that I could turn it off.

I suppose I could be wrong or even "paranoid" as you seem to suggest but after all the recent media hype about Google intruding into people's personal lives, gathering personal info etc and even foreign countries filing law suits against Google it seemed to me to be more more than paranoia. Doesn't paranoia require that there be no factual basis? Then there's the tiny, perhaps insignificant fact that they like you to do everything on their servers, you know, your contacts and all, instead of on your own PC. But again, thx for letting me know how stupid and paranoid I am :)

btw my flawed thinking was assisted by this source....

From TinyEnormous.com

Ok this hack might not be for everyone, but if you have Gmail set up to check your pop accounts they don’t let you set the polling frequency anywhere. This can be bad because it makes you go to the settings page to be able to hit the refresh button on each one of your accounts! After a little digging it turns out it uses a weird formula to determine the polling frequency. Let’s say it checks your account and finds an email. The next time it checks it will wait for _slightly less time_ before it checks again. If it finds email a second time it will continue to shorten the interval until it is checking every 5 minutes or so (maybe even less!) The purpose of this is so that google doesn’t waste resources checking an account that only gets one email a month.


The downside of this approach is that if you are eagerly waiting for that one email you might be waiting for a long time (i have seen wait times up to 58 minutes!)
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Maybe we shouldn't be so quick to condemn others? Maybe it's better to call it a "difference of opinion or perspective"?

I like pull because I like to control when I check for emails. There are times I don't want an email alert from some sources but still do from others or in the case of numerous mailboxes, some I want to poll every minute, others once a day. The important thing is that I have my reasons, and I don't necessarily feel the need to make those specific needs public.
 
It's not actually 'polling' but I have the notification set to 'never' and I manually sync all of my accounts via the control widget. That way, I get my email when I have time to read it :)
 
AirCatHeavy said:
Honestly, I could have left the Google comment out. That was probably just frustration from finding one more thing Google does it's way rather than allowing me to do it the way I feel is best for me.
Click to expand...

Can you give other examples? Google has a reputation of letting people do things their own way and, honestly, that ends up burning them a lot of times. People try to do things their own way, it burns them, then they blame Google.

I suppose I could be wrong or even "paranoid" as you seem to suggest but after all the recent media hype about Google intruding into people's personal lives, gathering personal info etc and even foreign countries filing law suits against Google it seemed to me to be more more than paranoia.
Click to expand...

How was Google accused of "intruding into people's lives"? If you're speaking of the wifi incident, I fail to see how it's Google's fault they overheard people screaming their personal information in the streets. And yes, that's exactly what you're doing when you're running an unsecured wifi network. The countries filing lawsuits against Google tend to be anti-trust in nature so I'm not sure what your point is.

Doesn't paranoia require that there be no factual basis? Then there's the tiny, perhaps insignificant fact that they like you to do everything on their servers, you know, your contacts and all, instead of on your own PC. But again, thx for letting me know how stupid and paranoid I am :)
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Not sure what your point is. Apple is doing the exact same thing with iCloud. Should we fear them? I have contacts on my company's server. Should I fear my company? Facebook has an entire list of your closest friends and family AND they have a history of privacy breaches. Should we just stay at home and cower in fear? But no one forces you to use any of these services. No one forces you to give any information to Google.
 
If you want to poll with GMail, you can always set up GMail on the secondary email app that comes with every phone. The process requires merely entering your gmail address and login. The rest of the setup is pretty automatic. You can set up the frequency in the settings.

So you dont recieve stuff twice, to disable the original GMail app, you go to the Settings, then Accounts and Sync, and check off the GMail. This email app lets you view all your email accounts in one view and in some phones even let's you pinch and zoom on the mail contents.
 
EarlyMon said:
He already said he spoke when frustrated and explained he was being given advice from a site that we'll just call "other" in quality - and got good answers here to solve the issue at hand.

No need for any further confrontation here, thanks.
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I think he was referring to the bolded here (and wondering what the other things he mentions are):

Honestly, I could have left the Google comment out. That was probably just frustration from finding one more thing Google does it's way rather than allowing me to do it the way I feel is best for me. I also mistakenly thought I HAD to have the Gmail account active, but as pastafarian pointed out (in a courteous manner), was that I could turn it off.
Click to expand...

I'm also wondering what the other things are that the OP is referencing (In addition to the GMail), im not trying to flame or anything, honestly would like to know what problems the OP is having with Google so that there could maybe be a good discussion on it.
 
AirCatHeavy said:
Roze,

That is the cutest avatar you have :D

Is that a stock avatar or did you come up with that?
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Thanks :) I got the Android picture off the net and asked one of the guys here, eyebeam, to put bunny ears and a carrot to make Mr. Bunny Droid ^_^
 
I'm done with the Google rant. ;)

I think we all get frustrated at times and I need to also respect others and not blurt out opinions without regard to how other might interpret it.

Thanks for everyone's concern, assistance and feedback.

I will say that Google also provides quite a bit of useful apps and features, even if they frustrate me occasionally :)

Here's a link to a Wikipedia article on Google's Privacy issues if you're interested.
It's quite comprehensive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google
 
Roze said:
Thanks :) I got the Android picture off the net and asked one of the guys here, eyebeam, to put bunny ears and a carrot to make Mr. Bunny Droid ^_^
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You and me both. I've found that letting Google sync everything messes up the laptop and desktop mail. Apparently, you can't specify which device you would want to sync. So I don't sync.
 
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