Courtesy of Laurie Orlov

We are so lucky in the “cloud.” In the “cloud”, delivery of computing works as a service rather than a product and vendors upgrade, with or without us. No mater if we are juniors, seniors, young or old. It must have been a thorn in the side of Google engineering that they had separate privacy policies for each of their products. Inconsistent contact handling between Gmail, Gmail chat, Google+, probably plagued them and their boatload of acquired companies (like Youtube, DoubleClick, Feedburner, etc.). Google’s streamlining could be an interesting challenge for users as they simplify their own maintenance workload beginning on March 1. Many ‘features’ and new defaults may startle us -- and not in a positive way.

Re-read the settings, Contact Management settings: times are a-changin’, re-read the settings section. Turns out since April, 2011 (just before the launch of the questionably useful Google+ in June, 2011), Google decided to upgrade the way it manages Gmail contacts, to set the stage for 'integrating’ the privacy policy across all of its software. Your Gmail contacts – the people you send and receive e-mail from - are presented as Gmail chat possibilities and now also in Google+ circles. Chatters that you may encounter by surprise may now require you to block them if you do not wish to see them as available for chat or do not wish to appear online to them. What is the new feature? Google added ‘Create contacts for auto-complete’ from your sent e-mails. This is the default setting, with the alternative being “I’ll add contacts myself.” So if you respond to an e-mail, the contacts are created and if these individuals use Gmail chat functions and your status is set to available, they can initiate chats with you. They could also stalk you quietly by knowing you’re online and that if you're elderly, you may be sitting home alone with your one and only desktop computer.