lab 16

Facebook.com

Privacy Policies
1. Facebook.com keeps track of the actions you take on Facebook, such as adding a friend, becoming a fan of a Facebook Page, joining a group or an event, creating a photo album, sending a gift, poking another user, indicating you “like” a post, attending an event, or authorizing an application. In some cases you are also taking an action when you provide information or content to us. For example, if you share a video, in addition to storing the actual content you uploaded, Facebook.com might log the fact you shared it.

2. Certain categories of information such as your name, profile photo, list of friends and pages you are a fan of, gender, geographic region, and networks you belong to are considered publicly available, and do not have privacy settings. You can limit the ability of others to find this information on third party search engines through your search privacy settings.

3. - Some of the content you share and the actions you take will show up on your friends’ home pages and other pages they visit.

Personalized settings

1. My Birth date and birth year I made available to friends, and friends of friends instead of everyone.

2. My education and work status I left available for everyone to see, which was a default setting.

3. I made it so only friends can comment on my wall posts instead of everyone which is the default setting.

Amazon.com

Privacy Policies
1. Amazon.com might receive information about you from other sources and add it to our account information.

2. Amazon.com uses the information that you provide for such purposes as responding to your requests, customizing future shopping for you, improving our stores, and communicating with you.

3. Amazon.com stores any information you enter on their Web site or give them in any other way.

Personalized settings

1. I use the default setting used for browsing, and let Amazon keep track of my browsing history.

2. I also use the default advertising settings, which lets Amazon come up with personalized ads for me.

3. I however don’t let Amazon e-mail me about special offers, which is my own custom setting.

AOL.com

Privacy Policies

1. Your AOL Member information may be used to conduct research about your use of the AOL Service.

2. AOL may share AOL Member information in order to present you offers with or on behalf of their business partners, but AOL does not allow these partners to use your AOL Member information for any other purpose.

3. Your AOL Member information, including the contents of your private online communications, may be accessed and disclosed in response to legal process (for example, a court order, search warrant or subpoena).

Personalized settings

1. I use the default setting to display new mail automatically.

2. I have my setting customized so that when I read my e-mail it does not pop up in a new window.

3. I use the default setting for AOL.com to play a sound when I receive new e-mail.

Skype

Privacy Policies

1. Skype uses information about your usage of and interaction with the Skype software, Skype’s products and websites including computer and connection information, device capability, bandwidth, statistics on page views, and traffic to and from their websites.

2. Skype gathers Identification data (ex. name, address, telephone number, mobile number, email address).

3. Skype does not sell, rent, trade or otherwise transfer any personal and/or traffic data or communications content to any third party without your explicit permission, unless it is obliged to do so under applicable laws or by order of the competent authorities.

Personalized settings

1. I customized my Skype account by adding a picture on my account for my friends to see.

2. I also customized my Skype profile by adding information in the “about me” section that my friends can see.

3. I customized my profile to let other people search for my by name Skype name and location, instead of just Skype name.


iTunes

Privacy Policies

1. Your personal information helps iTunes keep you posted on the latest product announcements, software updates, special offers, and events that you might like to hear about.

2. Apple does not sell or rent your contact information to other marketers.

3. Apple also collects information for market research purposes — such as your occupation and where you use your computer — to gain a better understanding of our customers and thus provide a more valuable service.

Personalized settings

1. I created a nick name on iTunes to rate songs and write reviews, which is not a default setting.

2. I allow iTunes to run a default service called Genius, which suggests music and movies that I would like.

3. I have also customized my iTunes account so that they don’t send me e-mail alerts.

lab 15

SKYPE
Strengths
- Ability to play games with buddy
- People search
- History
- Online status
- Organizational options
- Can text and talk
- Sound testing
- Fun
- File Sharing

Weaknesses
- Kind of difficult to use
- Video quality
- Voice Quality
- Advertisements

GOOGLE
Strengths
- Medium video quality
- Sound quality is good
- Can make video large or small
- Simple

Weaknesses
- Very plain
- Kind of hard to use
- No sound options
- No video options
- No text option
- No file sharing
- No games
- Just not very many options at all
- No real interface
- Difficult to start
- Boring

YAHOO!
Strengths
- Ability to play games with buddy
- Can translate incoming and outgoing messages
- File sharing
- Can change environment
- Can send text as well
- Ability to appear offline
- Ability to create an avatar
- Sound testing
- Fun, but not as fun as Skype

Weaknesses
- Not the easiest to use
- Video quality


Compare and Contrasts
Well first of all these are all great services. These services can provide an alternative to cell phones. Google, Skype, and Yahoo are all free, and all offer video chat services. These Services are all really cool because you can actually see the person that you are talking too. However in order to use these programs you have to be connected to the internet, and the other person you want to talk to has to be using the same service.

I’ll start off with Skype. Skype has some cool things that Google and Yahoo don’t. It has the ability to let a person search for other people by name, e-mail address, or Skype name. Skype also had a cool perk that allows a person to view their chat history. The other services only offer searches by their online names. Skype also offers a few different online status options, that Google does not offer at all and Yahoo only offers two. It was very easy to figure out how to start and end a call on Skype as well. The other services were not as intuitive as Skype. Google chat I thought was near impossible to figure out how to start a video chat, but once you did it was the most boring service out there. Yahoo chat had a pretty easy call start and call end process too, but I just liked Skype better.

Now I thought Google was the worst of all the services. The only thing Google chat offered that Skype and Yahoo didn’t was simplicity. Skype, and Yahoo both had more options available, games to play, and the option to text and talk. There is not much to say about Google chat except for that the video quality was decent compared to Skype and Yahoo. However, once you got Google chat up and running it got very boring very fast. Google didn’t offer game play between you and your buddy, a text option, or any other options like Skype and Yahoo offered. Besides being boring, I found Google’s interface to be very difficult to use. It took me the longest time to figure out how to make a call.

Yahoo would be my second choice in video chat services. Some really cool things that Yahoo offered which no other service had were the ability to create an avatar, translate incoming and outgoing messages, and you can change the background of that chat window. However, I thought Yahoo’s video quality was the worst. The other services had better video quality. I also thought Yahoo was difficult to use. Skype was easier to use, and Google was the hardest to get started. One great thing I liked about Yahoo was the ability to play games with your buddy. The games option is a great tool if you are having a dull conversation and need to spice things up. Skype also had game play available, but Google did not. Yahoo was overall a good service. The interface was not that hard to use, and the quality of service and excitement of Yahoo chat was good as well, but I found Skype to be just a little bit better in every category.

My favorite service out of all of these was Skype. I really liked all of the options that Skype offered like all of the games. The video service was not the best, but not one service’s video or sound quality was much better than the rest. I also like that Skype’s only business is video chat, unlike Yahoo and Google which do e-mail and many other things, which divert their attention to other services of their company. Skype also had the easiest interface to navigate around. Many things on Skype I found to be very intuitive like making a call, choosing someone to talk to, searching for people, and playing games. Overall I liked skype because it had good quality, it was easy to use, and it was fun.