As most of the people in the
competitive world, I have a Gmail account. And it is not even an option, it is
a need. You cannot access to lots of services/webpages/apps, like YouTube,
Google Play, Google Store, Chrome, etc. if you do not have one.
I do not usually check it though. To receive e-mails I use
other accounts in different e-mail webpages. But today I decided that I would
go and delete all the spam that I had in my Gmail and take a look at some changes
that I would make, and actually I did it.
As I was checking stuff I found out that all my cellphone
contacts were there, yes, in my e-mail account. It was not even the e-mail of
my contacts, only the phone numbers. Of course I didn’t put those numbers there
and never asked for it, but they were there. I decided I would delete them. Oh
well, I have them on my cellphone, I do not need them here- was what I thought.
Surprisingly, I found out hours later that a number of my contacts in my
cellphone were missing. What the crap!
I was mad. Of course I was mad. I went to Gmail again trying
to find a way to bring my contacts back. Thank God that I found an option to
restore any changes that I had made on my Gmail contacts in the last 30 days. I
thought that probably the contacts that I had on my Gmail account (since they
were not all the ones I have on my cell) were only from the people that also
had Gmail accounts. But, as I was digging into the Gmail options to restore, I
also realized that the contacts that remained in my cellphone were also in my
Gmail account domain. But these ones (and I am still not sure why) were on a
different folder in my mail that I didn’t delete. Okay.
And since everything is interconnected these days, of course
that also means that YouTube, Google, and all the rest of the departments have indirectly
my cellphone contacts. I tried to find an option on my cellphone to undo that
connection. I found nothing. I even disabled the option to synchronize my
contacts with other accounts, but it didn’t change anything. So apparently I
cannot do anything about it.
I have never had any problem with my social networks
controlling my information. Yes, I know they sell my information as everyone
else’s to companies and make money out of that, but well, it is a competitive
world and I always understood that. But… my cellphone contacts?! That seems a
little bit extreme to me.
Here is a link that shows that is not really current
(published 3 years ago) but discusses a little bit of the Google domain and how
it works.
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