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Google Reader Begins Sharing Private Data
Felipe Hoffa writes "One week ago Google Reader's team decided to begin showing your private data to all your GMail contacts. No need to opt-in, no way to opt-out. Complaints haven't been answered. Some users share their problems, including one family who says they won't be able to enjoy this Christmas because of this 'feature.' Will Google start doing this with all their products? You can check a summary of complaints in my journal here or browse the whole thread in Google Groups."
I'm sorry, but I'm with Google on this one. I was using Reader for a while after it was activated before I noticed it. It shares exactly what I expect with exactly who I expect. I've been using it for about a week now and I haven't felt like there was any violation of privacy.
sigs are a waste of space
Ive just had a quick check.
that is to say - they are not shared by default.There is a shared items area in my google reader, however none of my feeds are listed in there.
Granted, the feature is there but its hardly invading my privacy without me having a say in what can and cannot be displayed - and by default for me nothing is.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
This seems like they just added the same feature that make Del.icio.us such a popular sight. I can understand if this is sharing your pr0n folder with grandma, but if your using an RSS feed for that, than I'm just way behind the times I guess?
Maybe someone with personal experience can help explain this better than the linked articles did. Did it automatically check all your previously stored items as being shared, or does it just default share everything?
but there seems to be a fairly obvious way to opt out. Its not sharing any of my private data, because I simply don't use the product.
If you aren't willing to give Google what they want then why should Google give you anything?
...more often than not are proprietary software. An open source desktop application would more than likely to have a thousand options for customisation so that all the users are pleased, (gnome applications excluded of course). If you are running proprietary software on your desktop or a proprietary web application then you use what you are given.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
at this point, anything google does is going to piss off someone. They need to keep growing to keep the suits happy, but the more they grow, the less I (and others) like them. Yahoo tried to be everything to everybody and failed it bigtime. Maybe if their search wasn't full of shit results they could look it up.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
It's quite a surprising mistake from Google, particularly when the merge with Double-Click "brings greater focus on privacy". Even if they claim that they fix some problems and offer more control to users, they could have make these fix before launching the service... but it's a beta. That's what you risk when you use free beta services.
Furthermore, it is a good example of privacy lack of consideration, and it offers a good argument to privacy defenders. In addition, it highlights the fact that every service offered per Google potentially involves privacy problems. In fact, like Google, I wouldn't have believed that GReader data were so sensitive. And once again, it proves that privacy matters only when you lost it.
So far, we used anonymity to protect privacy, but in that case... proxies are useless. How can we protect privacy against such threats? One solution is to use obfuscation: generating noise (for instance, subscribing to additional RSS flows that we'll never read) in our profile so neither Google, nor our gmail contact can find out which are the RSS flows we are really reading. This assumes that the obfuscation mechanism let only the user know to which flows it really subscribed.
I don't think such mechanism exists now for Greader, but I'm developing a FF plug-in (http://squigglesr.free.fr) to protect search privacy using obfuscation. Keywords are extracting from your favorite RSS flows (for example the one you subscribed in greader) to generate personalized queries. It's quite similar to TrackMeNot (which also use obfuscation), but I'm trying to make less noise but make it more coherent (a good comparison is trying to make lot of noise around what you say, or simply mix some coherent conversations).
So I went looking for how this ruined x-mas for someone and found the link.
It seems like to me that what started out as something that was shared turned into a pissing match between already barely tolerating each other family members. I fault this summary because intentional escalation of individuals is *not* the fault of google (or anyone other than the parties involved.
The laws of physics have begun exposing all of your private items to the world. In a stunning turn of events, it has been discovered that if you place things on your front lawn with a gigantic sign saying "Look at me!", people can freely see them.
"This is outrageous", screamed Peter P Hysterical on the same forum where he documents every nanosecond of his life. "There's no opt out procedure, there's no whitelisting. It's just everyone looking at all the stuff I've decided to share."
God, responding to inquiries said, "Look, if you don't want people to see your stuff, put it inside. I created walls for a reason."
...No need to opt-in, no way to opt-out...
Not exactly. According to Google:
"You can hide items from any friend you don't want to see, and you can also opt out of sharing by removing all your shared items."
http://www.celticminded.com/ Yarrrrrrrrrrr
I'm relieved that I don't use Reader. If I did, I would probably have been sharing atheist and NSFW articles with my spouse and some close friends. I work in politics, and if that stuff had gotten out to other people on my contact lists, my career would have been over. I don't trust Google anymore.
First of all, I had no idea what Google reader is: which already makes it a low privacy risk to me. So I did a google for Google Reader, and found this page: http://www.google.com/reader/view/#directory-welcome-page. I'm not sure if the message on the side was always there, but it clearly states that it shares the data with "friends". "friends" being people on your google talk list.
I watched the video introduction about it, and it didn't seem to require personal data to use. Nor did the article summary say what the personal data that it was sharing is. So I'm going to guess it is sharing what ever it is that it is helping you get.
What this says to me is that people are still working with the assumption that things online apps hosted by third-parties help them to get it still private. I don't trust my ISP, farless Google. My lack of trust however, doesn't prevent me from consuming their useful services.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
I just deleted all my gmail contacts to realize that I don't have anything in a shared folder. Thanks.
Just kidding.
Does anyone know if it's possible to sign up to any of the job sites with Google Reader? Seems like a good way to drop a subtle hint to my boss.
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
As with all features, there's going to be a bunch of people complaining about how it works, etc. After a while, the furor dies down, and new users come and actually like it.
So yeah, a lot of people don't like our new feature, but they'll get over it.
So you don't mind Yahoo pasting spam into your outgoing emails? Those little ads at the bottom of your emails from Yahoo (and msn) users are rather annoying. It's one thing to pay for the service by viewing ads, but it's another to pay for it by spamming non-users.
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
As many readers have commented, this does not seem like such a big deal. Shared stuff being public? Who cares? Don't do it, ya morons! And so on.
I don't use GMail, or Google's reader. However, from TFA and the complaints, it appears as though there was a service where you could aggregate and re-publish feeds through a link that was not (automatically) published anywhere. Google changed the semantics of this, to mean that these "shared" feeds are now automatically available to everyone in your contact list. This (rightfully) has pissed off many existing users, who have invested their time into a system that they must now abandon, because most people have the concept of "mixed company." You don't talk about certain topics in certain groups -- you might be fine making dirty jokes around your regular friends, for example, but you behave yourself when you're at a professional lunch.
So, this is not a matter of not using it -- it's a matter of bait-and-switch. The rules got changed out from under the user's feet, and that leads to a feeling of betrayal in the case where embarrassing information gets leaked. Google gave the impression that you were just hanging out with your friends, and then let in your stuffy colleagues while you were in the middle of telling The Aristocrats Joke.
This is such a bad summary. I have no idea what's going on from this summary.
Others have called it misleading, but I wouldn't know, because I have no idea what it's talking about.
FYI: I don't know what you guys are talking about half the time.
I decided to play around with Google reader because of this article. The first subscription I added was /. This article is not showing up in the subscriptions. I tried to force the refresh but still nothing. Maybe it will pop up in a few minutes.
Now, had they been straight and called it for what it is, "You're auto opted in and the only way to opt out is a painful and destructive process that devalues other aspects." then that would be one thing. Blatantly misrepresenting to jump to the head of the wambulance queue - to the point where it's hard to believe it was anything other than deliberate - just devalues your point and loses you all credibility, even for your valid points.
chikety china, chinese chicken? you have?
Isn't private data supposed to be... well.. private?
I know, common sense need not apply here apparently.
I don't know why anyone would store anything important or personally sensitive anywhere on the internet anyway, unless you store everything encrypted. I've had close friends of mine under standing orders for years running to never email me anything of a personally sensitive nature, or at least understand that if they do, transmitting it via the internet is completely insecure. I read more and more about "online apps" instead of local apps, and online data storage companies, and I have to roll my eyes because I have to assume that sooner or later someone, either criminals, the government, or the company itself, is going to go browsing through whatever you've got stored on their servers. Bottom line: You want privacy for your data? Store it locally, or better yet, offline.
Google Reader begins sharing public data in a new way.
These were not "private" feeds, they were publicly available URLs (although obfuscated).
I'm not necessarily siding with Google on this one. I do think they should have thought this change of functionality out a little more, but the fact remains this data was already public. Comparing it to the Beacon scandal is not accurate at all.
OK, you sick spamming fuck. That was still offtoppic and trollish, but I LOL'd. Modify the script to randomly pick a filthy story, use a database of common names to figure out which strings correspond to the names of characters in the stories, and let regular expressions do their magic.
Per Google Reader Group they are only sharing the information that you asked them to share. And only with those that you have used Google Talk. I share things in Google Reader because I want other people to know what I'm reading, and what I find interesting. No where is there any private data, unless you count the profile that you create, which you can limit the amount of data that you place on that.
Google isn't sharing any private user data. If you don't want to share anything then don't click the share icon.
Save Pangaea!! Stop Continental Drift!!
I carry a laptop everywhere, and I'm not willing to trust my email to someone's potentially keylogger-infested machine. Webmail buys me nothing except OS independence, and Thunderbird gives me that, if I cared.
Doesn't change the from address. And if it did, that'd make me a bit more likely to be filtered, I'd bet.
I can do that anyway, though I usually tell people to stop adding me to these lists.
But did you know that desktop clients not only have unlimited filters, but unlimited storage? It's true! All you have to do is buy more disk space if you ever come close to running out!
I pay less than $10/year for a domain. Everything else is done by a server I have running in my house. I'd probably have this server anyway, just to play around with -- webhosting and such -- so Postfix is every bit as "free" to me as GMail. Moreso, because I don't have to put up with advertising. (Or spam -- my spamfilter is every bit as good as GMail's, as far as I can tell.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
While it may be smart to be honest and straightforward with people you're close to, it's no more Google's right to prevent that than it is their right to sell your personal info to spammers.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
"Share", in this context, did not always imply sharing with the entire world.
Yes, it perhaps wasn't the smartest choice by a lot of these people, but Google's actions, and specifically, their lack of a real response, is exactly the kind of "evil" they were trying to avoid becoming.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I'm not trying to justify Google here, but...
You're in politics, and porn and atheism are enough to end your career.
Not your fault, I'm sure, but that is sad.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
...it's how it was rolled out. Things that were not shared have now become shared.
If you actually work for Google, it sounds like your attitude is part of the problem.
Yes, the feature is cool. Yes, people will get used to the new way things work. No, it still was not OK how you rolled it out.
I mean, come on. You're fucking Google. You're supposed to be the best engineers in the world. So tell me, how hard would it be to have a "shared" option, and a third "publish" option which was off by default? And then to prompt people on their first login after introducing "publish" whether they wanted their stuff to be shared or published by default, and whether they wanted that change to affect all their shared stuff?
That took me, what, ten seconds to think up, and less than a minute to type, and this isn't even my fastest keyboard.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Are the folks at Google like the magical elves that come out at night and fix shoes? No, Google is a business. The folks who own Google do it for the money. You give Google your private data, and they mine the stuff out of it. There's nothing private about it. Your private data, after you give it to Google, isn't private any more.
I want to be able to moderate articles. Especially ones like this.
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
Funny, I actually didn't really care what /. editor posted which story until I read a couple of stinkers six months ago in which half the posters pointed out what a crappy editor kdawson was. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, then, to find this bit of FUD posted by the infamous editor as well.
Seriously, the first link is to a self-referenced Slashdot Journal. The second link is to a google groups thread discussing how google shares with your friends data that you've opted to share with your friends!!!
Seriously. This article is crap.
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
You own your life. That is, the actions you take have repercussions, which you have to deal with.
:o) be read by someone and cause a reaction in my life. I choose to put a widget on it that any item I share in Google Reader is (up to the limit on the widget) displayed on my site. I take these things into account when I choose to put something on that site, when I choose to share an item in Google Reader. I choose to make my shared items public (mostly Slashdot stories anyway).
And that extends to the online world, too. My website, I know what I put on there could (theoretically
But I do the same thing when I'm talking on the phone with someone, or interacting with them in person. I try to consider what I'm saying and how I'm saying it so that understanding is clear, so that information is easily acquired and assimilated.
And guess what, I'm doing that right now too, here on Slashdot responding to the article.
What is the big deal? There are some details I feel should be private and some of those details are protected by contract or law. The rest of them are at least plausibly available.
You don't know my blood pressure, you don't know my weight (err, I don't even know my blood pressure and weight), but looking through someone's Slashdot comments you can probably learn some details about their life. Same with their website, etc.
Ultimately it's what you're comfortable with. If you want to separate groups of friends or friends & family make another gmail account.
But above all remember this: if you believe your behavior is reasonable, own it. Whatever the reaction of others, good or bad, it's your life. If your wife or husband, son or daughter, mother or father, boss or coworker, friend or enemy has an opinion they'll express it. It may be kind or harsh. At the end of the day you may suffer for being who you are, but that is always better than suffering for being who you aren't.
And you shouldn't feel bad because others don't approve of you, like I said, as long as your behavior is reasonable.
-HobophobE
Nothing laughs forever.
The headline and summary of this article are not only false, but probably illegal slander. In no way can the sharing of "shared" data be considered "sharing private data," whether or not some users fooled themselves into thinking it was private. If anything, this is a benevolent move on Google's part because it makes users more aware of the fact that data they are explicitly making public is, in fact, public.
So fuck you, Slashdot, for lying to me and wasting my time.
journalplug
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
OMG, Y U H8 TEH GOOGEL? DEY DUNT BE TEH EVIL DERE MOTO EVEN BE TEH DUNT BE TEH EVEL!1!!
Teh Googel is not teh MiKKKr0$$$l0th, so dey kant be teh evel!!!!
Gotta love the woman who insists her christmas was ruined because her brother saw her political opinions that he didn't approve of. Is it Google's fault that her and her family has serious respect and acceptance issues? I could have seen if, perhaps, a boss saw this sort of thing, but not one's own brother. You'd expect Bro already knew she was whatever she was, and wouldn't have been surprised by her shared posts. It's not like Google forced him to read her share list, either. If she was hiding her politics from her family... geez, whose fault is that exactly? If her family is so unaccepting, the question of "why spend christmas with them?" comes to mind.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Google is calculating your affinity towards certain individuals in your address book
Data is here
http://video.google.com/data/contacts
Have to be logged into Google
If you read the article (joke joke; please don't hit me :-) you would know that they were differentiating "private" links from public ones. The private ones were shared only with chosen people. What they have done now is to make all the "private" links public without warning. That's definitely bad. It's an excusable mistake possibly, but when they don't react immediately to complaints it becomes a serious problem. Many people who can't set up their own document and sharing mechanisms rely on services such as Google. These commercial shared services should be legally responsible for the effects of all their actions.
so
google will share your public shared list with people you know (and only with people you explicitly know, not "everyone", and only when you actively share it.)
seriously, what the hell is the problem with this?
you people need to grow up.
I'm quitting Gmail, notebook and my web history account. God knows what will happen when they share my private data with my future wife and kids. For others I do not really care.
Heh. This sounds like it could be fun, actually, and I'm not even gay. I'm almost tempted to finally get a GMail account and start sharing some gay stuff just to see if mom will try to give me advice about _that_ too.
Hmm, actually, now I'm getting even better ideas. Do they have some feeds about, dunno, bestiality or such?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Stories like this are why I have virtually stopped reading slashdot.
Phillip
Unlike other Google products, Google Reader doesn't work over SSL, so it's not secure to begin with.
Google Reader has a nice user interface, but until that gets fixed, I'm not using it at all.
I was sharing articles with my other gmail account and effectively using shared items as a tag... I am in trouble... If what the summary says is true this is bad form from Google...
:(
Crap! I gotta check what my contacts might have seen...
A--- Will not read again!
But I call bullshit on this one. People can't be THAT dubious to be caught pants-down by this. I tried for 2 hours to get my partner and I connected together so I could share interesting articles with her, but gmail and reader wouldn't acknowledge the relationship.
1. You can't remove shared items easily.
Yes, you can. Settings -> Friends -> Clear Shared Items
2. Your friends can see everything
Only things you share, yes. But whats the point in "sharing" them if no one can see them?
3. Your mom might see your shared items.
Block your mom from doing so, Settings -> Friends -> Hide (Next to mom's name)
4. You're affraid of Google Reader
Well, export your subscriptions and use another product. Simple.
Facebook shares messages that you sent to a person with all of your mutual friends. That's what I call scary.
You're way off base. First of all, You need to explicitly invite people as friends in reader. Second, only items you explicitly share are visible. When I share an item I've always assumed I was sharing it with everyone.
This is an opportunity for a smart Google leader to step up and drive the way towards greater personal control. One of the things that plagues soooo many sites, social sites, wikis, etc etc etc, is the concept of "double-tier" information access: 1) Publicly visible, 2) Not.
But life isn't like that, and there is no reason that users should be forced into those two simple camps.
If Google stepped up and became one of the first major "social" sites to offer fine-grained privacy and sharing controls, it would find itself a very unique feature with a lot of potential customer draw.
- DaftShadow
Please take a moment to brush up on your history before you make such un-informed posts. If you join right now they tell you what the current behaviour is: "share" means with all contacts. That's an acceptable behaviour. Nothing wrong with it, execapt that the "sharing" feature is not new, and before it had a different behaviour: the shared feeds appeared on a "secret" URL, and you had control over who could see the feeds. So, if you "shared" feeds before, and didn't notice the new announcement, suddenly a lot of people were told of your share -- people who you may have not wanted to know. That is a serious privacy concern.
According to the article the problem is not that the data was being shared with "friends", but Google changed the definition of "friends".
If you weren't using the shared-items feature then it's no big deal. If you want to use it then they've broken it pretty badly my making the stupid assumption that everyone you've ever emailed is a close friend that you would show anything to.
The people who are really screwed are the ones who were sharing things with a small group of close friends and suddenly had their private suggestions opened up to their relatives, cow-orkers, and creepy stalkers as well. The more people you got into Google, the worse it is, so they're pissing off their own best proponents.
Eh, this is mom we're talking about. It's more the other way around. I'd worry about sanity loss if she _didn't_ offer some advice on a topic. Even if she has to google it before calling.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Many people are overlooking the fact that you can share specific tags (and each of those shared tags will have its own URL and RSS feed). So, if you want to share stuff with just your family, tag the articles/feeds with a "family" tag, mark it shared and give them the URL. Likewise, do the same for work colleagues, friends, etc. You're not just stuck with one global shared feed for all your contacts and nothing else.
Well, that's good for the defense too then. I can just see it. "Your honour, as you can clearly see from my list of topics and interests, I'm attracted to wooly farm animals and big sweaty guys who look like a gorilla. Miss Wossherface is, I would guess, a fine representative specimen of a human female, if you're into _that_ kind of thing, but she'd need wool and horns before I'd be _that_ interested in her. No offense, miss. I mean, seriously, does she look even remotely like anything in those photos? I can't see myself even trying too much persuasion on her, even if I were drunk out of my mind, much less something like date rape. Now if she had hooves and a tail... mmmm... where was I? Right. Plus, your honour, I would like it to be noted that I don't support rape even with animals. I like it all between consenting mammals, and I know which 'baah' means 'no.'" ;)
Well, now seriously, it was a joke. And if I have to explain it, I guess it already failed to be funny.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Where your friends can see your privates.
To do list for Windows
Just checked my normal Gmail account, it's up to 6.
Still, my point stands. Why is it that our work accounts have 25 gigs, while my personal account has 6? Are we paying extra, or does Google simply give more space to people who've bothered to register a domain?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I think what a lot of the "public data is public" folks are missing is that even when someone elects to "share" their information with someone else, that doesn't meant that they want that sharing of information to become public knowledge to everyone, for all time.
Up until 12/14/07, the Google Reader had been a bit broken. It was difficult to share information with everyone in an individual's contact list. There were 3 user responses to this: 1. Stop using Reader until this was fixed. 2. Work around the problem, possibly coding something of your own. 3. Take advantage of this issue by selectively sharing with people you want, while not sharing with people you do not.
Google's "fix" brought groups #1 and #2 into the fold, with the effect of alienating group #3. It turns out a lot of people were using this "bug" to keep some people not completely aware of what the account holder was doing. Now, it is all out in the open. The problem, for Google, is two-fold.
First, they did not give adequate notice that this change was going to happen. They announced the change on a Friday night, then immediately implemented it. I am sure that some folks came to work Monday morning and were caught flat-footed by the change. Most of these folks (in camp 3, above) are steaming mad, and are burning up the forums.
Second, they did not give users an option to "revert it back to the way it was". In fact, this has all the hallmarks of a permanent shift, although Google claims publicly that this "is still a very experimental feature". Somehow, I don't believe them. If it were very experimental, they would have switched it back to the original configuration after the 10th complaint hit the forum. It looks like what they really mean is "This is the way it's going to be from now on, so deal with it."
Q: What part of shared don't you understand?
A: If I were to "share" my hard drive across my LAN, wouldn't I feel a little uncomfortable if I saw the contents of my hard drive appear on a public forum, or in a public place? This is the same feeling Google Reader users are getting, I bet. Suddenly a word that they thought meant one thing (shared to a limited group of people in the contacts list) became a completely different concept (shared with everyone in contact list). Such a radical shift should not be implemented overnight, with virtually no user feedback. In fact, even after the feedback, it appears that Google is unwilling to revisit this issue.
Q: Why should I be ashamed or embarrassed to share my information with all the folks in my contact list? I mean, what do I have to hide?
A: Slashdot readers, in particular, should be knowledge regarding the privacy implications of this move. One concept that people have a hard time grasping is contextual privacy. I want to share a certain amount of information with some people (my love of WWII FPS games with my friends) while sharing other things with others (my knowledge of hedge fund movements with Wall Street people). With the new Google model, everyone is on equal footing. My carefully segregated contacts have been ruined, thanks to Google. Oh well, start again with another RSS reader, but the damage has already been done. Now, my Wall Street buddies know I like to play FPS games (I can of much more incriminating examples) and my reputation has been ruined.
If someone doesn't sue Google, I would be surprised. They are a company based in Mountain View, CA. I am sure that there is at least one person in CA who feels "cheated" by Google. We Californians (yikes, gotta stop giving away personal information like that) are a litigious lot, and I'm sure someone is going to claim damages out of this whole thing. The title of my post explains why.
In the Silicon Valley, there people who live by multiple allegiances, and there are people paid to figure out the allegiances of those subjects. If the Godfather taught me anything, it's "Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies clos
Ruined your christmas???
HAHA
This calls to mind Facebook's cute way of sending out invitations for your new Facebook page to _every_ contact in your Yahoo account. Completely counter-intuitive but very effective marketing.
So, great marketing tool for Google in much the same way. But counter-intuitive, and I'd also say just as irresponsible to its users.
I hope this is a lesson to people who use online sites to store private data. You cannot trust these companies to use your data in the way you would expect from a friend. Your friends are the people you know. Not the company who knows you know them..
Because every professional just _has_ to keep his own SMTP server with multiple redundant mail drops, back-up and web interface, simplified interface for WAP/mobile devices and a spam filter, right?
:)
Instead professionals should simply get Google Apps for their domain and have Google Mail work as "professional@thatismydomain.com". Duh
Hyperom.com
I agree that it sounds like an advertisement in the end, but I don't think it's off-topic. Clearly, the subject is related to privacy issues. What I wanted to point out, is that considering all integrated services of Google, anonymity is not anymore a solution to protect privacy. Clearly, you want to have access to all your services most of the time which is not possible when you use anonymity. Because all the services are linked, so, if you want to use one service anonymously, you can't use the other services (in this topic: you can't use Greader anonymously).
This is very important I guess, because most of the time, proxy (which assures anonymity) is preferred to obfuscation tools (see the Bruce Schneier review of TrackMeNot). That's why I think obfuscation is becoming the most reliable solution to protect privacy, and in this case I'm sure that a solution using obfuscation would have been useful to protect Greader accounts.
The big deal here is that Google considers anyone in your GMail _contacts_ list to be a _friend_.
This includes former work associates, clients, people asking for software support, people you replied to via mailing lists, and anyone else who you happened to a) send an email to and b) uses GMail themselves.
This is a gross violation of privacy, folks, even within the privacy-compromised Googleplex. Stop blaming the victims. I signed up for Reader last week and it felt creepy to see shared posts from people I used to work with.
If someone puts data in an area with a defined permission or privilege, then caution is always advised when the permissions are changed.
The Google policy should have been to introduce new levels of sharing, e.g. (a) private, (b) user-defined groups, (c) gmail networked, (d) gmail subscribers, (e) public. Looking at previous posts on this subject, it looks like Google's sharing feature was originally a (b) level, but has been elevated to (c). Google should have left everyone's data in (b), giving users the option to move shared items between new folders that may be assigned permission types (a) to (e).
Analogy: You've just created a blog entry that only you and your friend can read. Your friend makes an off-hand comment, then you make the entry public. Your friend will feel betrayed by the change in privacy.
Google, when you let me share certain items from a feed with the ENTIRE INTERNET, I somehow thought that nobody else would be able to see them. My mistake.
If you read the Google Desktop EULA it's the same thing. You agree you install the software according to current terms and conditions but you also agree you agree to new conditions Google can and will introduce without notice. Swallow that one with a Gallon of Google.
But this of course affects NO ONE I KNOW because none of us are SO FUCKING STUPID as to use a single Google service save for searches with cookies turned off.
There's nothing to be concerned about because all you trend freaks went in with eyes open precisely as Google marketing predicted you would - precisely as other saddened bystanders predicted you would.
You're so predictable. And so pathetic.