Safer Internet Day - Google Drive Bonus

by
in google on (#2X03)
For today's Safer Internet Day Google is promoting a "safer and more responsible use of online technology and mobile phones" by giving you a 2 GB Google Drive bonus for checking your security settings. To be eligible for the bonus, go to this page to verify your current account settings to make sure they are up to date. Although the three simple steps only take a few seconds to review, the storage bonus, unfortunately, does not get applied until around February 28th.

Whether or not you actually use their cloud storage service is still up to you (I'm currently using 0 GB of 115 GB) - but keeping an eye on your Google account logins (including any connected Android or iOS devices) is probably a good idea regardless.
Reply 4 comments

Thanks (Score: 2, Funny)

by Anonymous Coward on 2015-02-11 11:07 (#2X07)

I think I will spend the day deleting my google accounts. Perhaps then I will feel safer.

Did it, didn't get anything (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2015-02-12 10:09 (#2YJS)

They may have made this offer sporadically. I went through the system and checked my settings (and took advantage of the moment to de-authorize a couple of old apps that had wanted permissions).

In general, this was a useful thing, and I felt glad they had set up a convenient way to do this - kudos to Google for beating Microsoft and the bunch to the game. But I'm still leery of it all - traveled to an obscure place in December and then found an obscure video on Youtube about that place. Guess which video showed up in my Google Plus feed this week because someone else had commented on it? Not cool. Don't want my social stuff and my video watching to get linked, but thanks to Google they are indelibly linked. That makes me want to use Youtube.

Also on my Google Plus feed was a post about another, less obscure place I visited on the same trip. That might just be coincidence, but I do NOT like feeling like I'm on the receiving end of an algorithm determining which videos and information should be passed into the interior of my little data bubble. Don't like feeling like I'm being managed.

Re: Did it, didn't get anything (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2015-02-13 01:28 (#30C3)

Yet Android users still can't deny an app net access in standard Android OS.

Geolocation is fun! (Score: 1)

by billshooterofbul@pipedot.org on 2015-02-13 15:03 (#31DX)

I can't believe they used geo-ip lookup as part of their safety check up. They wildly missed on where my phone and tablet last logged in from. My ISP often assigns an ip address that was once assumed to be in a different section of the country. If I didn't know that, I might have been unnecessarily freaked out. I mean these are nexus devices that have location sharing turned on, and were connected to wifi. Google knows *exactly* where they were, and it wasn't what they reported because the just used geo ip lookups. Dorks.