Google is locking down API access to Gmail data (and later, Drive data) soon, and some of your favorite third-party apps might find themselves locked out of your Google account data. The new API policy was announced back in October, but this week Google started emailing individual users of these apps, telling them the apps will no longer work starting July 15. The new policy closes off OAuth access to Gmail data, and while we by no means have a comprehensive list of what isn’t affected yet, so far we’ve seen users of Microsoft’s SwiftKey and the open source app SMS Backup+ receive notification emails.
On the one hand, it’s good that Google is trying to make account access by third parties as secure as possible. On the other hand, it highlights just how dependent many of us are on data stored in the bellies of larger technology giants – and as consumers, we have little to no recourse in case one of our favourite applications gets cut off like this.
Oh, cry me a river. You people were warned years, and years ago about storing your data on 3rd party servers.
But oh, no Cloud Computing and the rest of it’s Ilk is the wave of the future…..
Well, the future is here, and it looks like you can’t get back or acess your data…..
Dr. Evil and Mini-Me is laughing at you people….
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You just came here to rant didn’t you. “you can’t get back or acess your data” …that is not what this article is about at all. Nobody is losing access to their data at all. It is 3rd parties (like Microsoft) that are losing access to your (Google) data.
For now, this is most similar to Twitter cutting of 3rd party apps or restricting “access to the firehose”. I don’t know enough about Googles reasons to know if they have a good reason to cut off oauth. As far as I know oauth is still the defacto standard online for authentication so closing this API seems strange
” Nobody is losing access to their data at all. It is 3rd parties (like Microsoft) that are losing access to your (Google) data.”
You actually think there’s a difference here? If the data is stored in a format people can’t easily read or acess, and you need the app that created the data to acess it (which you can no longer use) what’s your point?
Of course there is a difference here. Only a specific type of access to GMail (and later Google Drive) is turned off. You can still access that data through GMail and Google Drive so people aren’t loosing access to their data at all.
We are talking about an app like Microsoft SwiftKey reading your GMail to analyse your vocabulary so they can autocomplete words or peoples names that you often use
“We are talking about an app like Microsoft SwiftKey reading your GMail to analyse your vocabulary so they can autocomplete words or peoples names that you often us”
So you’re saying because you can read Gmail using Gmail, storing Microsoft SwiftKey data on your Gmail account or another 3-party server instead of on your local storage device is fine because?
Google just proved you wrong…..
Swiftkey isn’t storing data on Gmail, it is reading data from Gmail that was already stored there.
I also wasn’t arguing that what Google is doing is fine or that storing in GMail or GDrive is better than storing on the local storage. You were arguing that people were losing access to their data
My whole point was that you came here to rant about Cloud-Storage and Google in general without understanding what this particular topic was about at all