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Thursday, August 22, 2013

67

purged, lost and not coming back

the tendency of computer and internet based companies to want all their services and offerings to be interlinked and interconnected has caused one of my mates to come a cropper.
they had just bought a new laptop.
that meant windows 8.
in order to set up windows 8 they had to create a msn profile, in doing this they were asked about their previous hotmail account. they gave the wrong answer and old hotmail account has gone to that place in the internet heaven (no not the cloud).

funny thing is something similar happened to me recently. an attempt was made to hack my account.
that locked me out of my hotmail account for a few days.
eventually msn looked into my claim and lo and behold i was back using hotmail.
yay me.

so that is what i suggested to my mate.
it didn't work.

how odd i thought.

then i started noticing that i was getting things pop up on facebook that related to searches i had done on bing for stuff, or had been the result of me opening an email  (the email is not linked to facebook). a nice bit of data mining going on there.

this all ties in with the recent, and on going, hoohah about the internet, trolls and such like, and privacy and security, snowden, manning and miranda to name a few.
it might have been because i have grown up reading spy novels and watching spy movies that i wasn't all that surprised at the revelation that the state spies on us. i was more surprised that people thought that this was shocking news.

based on the recent conversations about the police and security services were going to be able to access when it came to people's emails and such like i had confidently told my friend that there would be no problem in getting the hotmail account back. just report it and they will resolve it.
simple.

not so.

on further reading once you delete a hotmail account all the data of that account is purged from the system. all gone. just like that.
gone.
gone.
gone.

so my friend has lost all their contacts and emails of many years.
hotmail are saying they can't do anything about it.

i wonder if the security services are aware of this? looks like all you need to do is get a hotmail account write your nasty dangerous email - send it and then delete your account and you are safe.
that seems to be what msn are telling us.

it is either that or they just can't be asked to help a distressed user who has made a mistake because of the overly complicated way that msn tries to link everything together.

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