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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
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."
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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
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.
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.
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
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