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TotallyOz

Privacy in 2013: A Odd but Very True Experience

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I have a friend of mine in Rome that checks my writing and makes changes to it as I am dyslexic and can't see when I make spelling mistakes.

I have been working on Berlin, Germany city guides. I had over 40 of them and I sent them to her from my Gmail account.

She checked things and went back and edited for spelling, etc and she also added the German addresses.

She sends me my documents back to 3 different email addresses. One of them is me.com and one is gmail.com

I noticed she had sent me the edited version to my gmail account but not to my Mobile Me account. I assumed she had forgotten and I forwarded it to my Me account but again, it was not there. I did this about 5 times before I assumed that my server for the Mobile Me was down.

I called them and told them what I was experiencing and that I was attaching a .doc called Berlin_Listings.doc The man was very kind and he walked me though several things and all the sudden I had sent a test from my gmail and it worked but it was not the forwarded document. This means that my Mobile Me was working but not for forwards.

I attempted to forward another message. It worked fine.

I was on the line with the Apple guy for over an hour and we finally decided that the document must have some characters that were not acceptable.

Now, this was not inside my email in a copy and paste job but it was attached in a document. Together the Apple Support Tech and I tested this with .doc .docx .txt .pages and a few others.

Guess what? Not once would it go through to Mobile Me. So, I started testing it page by page. It was 6 pages long and I copied each page and pasted into a document and sent from gmail to Mobile Me. All the pages worked but Page 4.

He had to get off the phone and talk to a supervisor and when he did, I tested Page 4 paragraph by paragraph and all worked except for one. It was one listing for a gay club in Berlin. I was never able to send it to my Mobile Me account.

When he returned, he asked that I send him page 4 and I did. He got his at apple.com and said, "see, it works here." I said, OK, how about I sent to your @me.com account and he said he could not give that to me as it was his personal account.

I said, "OK. so forward it to yourself." He did but guess what? It didn't work. He was shocked but I wasn't.

I had already determined what the issue was. He went to another supervisor and he was gone for a long time and when he returned he said it must be some odd character from German in the page. I told him yes, but I tested that and the other pages had all the same characters.

He was the supervisor of the first guy I talked to. I spent 2 hours with them. My issue was not resolved.

So, in other words, Apple has a filter that not only reads emails but reads INSIDE attached documents. It does this so fast that one second (from gmail to Mobile Me) it reads it and determines that a document was not acceptable to be sent.

Now, I didn't say it went to my junk folder. I said it was never received. In other words, to this day, 4 days ago, I have yet to receive any of the 20 emails I tested this with.

The main supervisor came on and said there must be a glitch somehow. When I asked if Apple read my document, he said that it did not. But, he said that some thing in the document set off a trigger. In other words, does this not mean that Apple had the technology to read inside my document?

Also, what happens, as I tested this, is that Apple not only reads the documents but it does so and decides to block it within one sec. Can you imagine the power behind this?

I go to bed that night a bit worried that someone had the power to read inside my mail in less than one sec and I was a bit pissed that the technology was there and being used against me for a gay listing of sex clubs in Berlin.

I woke up the next morning and went to check my mail. Guess what? There was a sign in Red Letters from Gmail that a suspicious attempt to read my email at Gmail was blocked. I have had this account at gmail for 10 years and not once did this ever occur. I do not to this day know why this happened to my Gmail account but I do know that someone from some group tried to read the mail in that account. As I keep passwords different, for every account, I wasn't too worried.

But, I cannot imagine why anyone would care about a bar/club in Berlin so much that all this happened to me.

I am also at a point where I have about decided to remove all my email accounts that are in the "cloud" and use my own email that is a pop account that no one can access without my computer.

Yes, this did scare me. Yes, I know something fishy went on. Yes, I lost a lot of trust and faith in Apple that night.

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Guest hitoallusa

Oh my it is so sexy that I get to know personal things about Oz. It's like a slow dating.. lol.. ^_^ Back to the topic. I don't think Apple necessary reads your email. Why would a simple bar list get flagged? There must be a technical glitch that could explain what has happened. If you want please send me the page four of your document via private message here. My email account linked to the site has been hacked and it's not the government who hacked. ^_^

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Oz, thanks for this report.

hitoall, thank you for these reports of iCloud's "silent spam filtering." This is even more pernicious than AOL's long-noted priggishness over email content it did not approve of.

I have not to date used Apple email (or cloud-storage) services, and now know not to.

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Wonder what it was that triggered auto response. In the link below, there was an incident where "barely legal teens" triggered auto spam program to respond. I don't think it was boytoy... hmm

http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/02/28/icloud-spam-filter-to-blame-for-censorship-of-emails-containing-pornographic-phrase

Wow, I had no idea about pre-filtering existed like this...I learned something new today. It is interesting that other email providers don't seem to do this....yet

Who really reads those "terms and conditions" we readily agree to when signing up for such accounts where this type of thing is covered. I suppose there are many things that are included in there that would give me pause if I read it thoroughly.

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