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How Google+ Measures Up On Privacy
itwbennett writes "The slow rollout of Google+ has led some to wonder whether Google was trying to create demand through scarcity, but it might just be that the company learned its lesson from the privacy fiasco that was the launch of Google Buzz. 'I think it is very smart of Google to restrict Plus to a "limited field trial" — they aren't even calling it a beta. Google made a misstep with the roll out of Buzz. They've already avoided that mistake with Plus with this limited release. And because it's so exclusive, tech savvy individuals are fighting to get in — just the type of folks that you want as beta testers,' said Sean Sullivan, an F-Secure security adviser. Of course, fixing bugs doesn't necessarily mean that Google will have privacy issues buttoned up. 'Google Plus is clearly designed to give people better control over their privacy with respect to their family, co-workers and friends, [but] there are other types of privacy that it simply can't provide,' says Peter Eckersley, a senior staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. 'Nobody has succeeded in building a social network that can offer those kinds of privacy protections yet.'"
Host 1: [Camera zooms in on the two hosts] Welcome back to Money Quest. [Kyle looks at the show] In just over two weeks, young financial genius Eric Cartman [his picture appears on the screen behind the hosts] has managed to turn a theme park that was seeing less than a hundred attendees a day into a thriving park with attendance in the thousands.
Host 2: And the way he did it is with the brilliant "You Can't Come" technique. For the first several days, the young businessman saturated the market with the claim that nobody could get into his park. It made the public crazy. So then, weeks later, when he opened the doors, they were lining up around the block. Simply amazing.
Host 1: Well, ahah I thnk we should point out that this technique is already being applied by businesses all over the country.
'Nobody has succeeded in building a social network that can offer those kinds of privacy protections yet. And nobody ever will.' - Networked computer will do everything but protect privacy. It can't be done any more than you can protect a radio broadcast. Even the best encryption depends on trust.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
If you want to have big big big privacy, then there's no use in joining any kind of social network. The whole idea is to share information with others. Now, you can lock down showing private information (or don't even need to fill in that information), so what's the problem? If you want most control of your privacy, I don't see why you would want to join a social network. As far as I can see it's "fine" as it is: you can share the information with the people you want. The only bad thing is when EULA's or whatever say you give the owner of network a license to do with your stuff as they see fit (usually for advertising). But if they didn't do that, it'd be a quick end. That's the idea: you give them your stuff, they give you their stuff.
Here's the secret to immortality:
Allowing people to specify who can see their information alongside inputting that information itself is a big plus (pun intended). In Facebook you have to trawl through confusing menus, and are left not knowing if you've really set the privacy settings you intended.
Let's say you want to invent the Next Facebook Killer But This Time With Privacy.
Your system needs to allow:
- People to make just enough information public to identify themselves (so friends can find them).
- People to send messages and make photos and other media available to others with whom they may not have connected but may have a legitimate interest in seeing it (that's pretty much the point).
- Assuming you're planning on monetizing this by selling ads, some sort of network effect to encourage more and more people to get into it. Facebook has this in spades with things like tagging; LinkedIn gets it by essentially asking its users to spam on its behalf.
- While at the same time ensuring that the above information doesn't end up in the "wrong" hands. The wrong hands doesn't have to be just advertisers - the most common example is if you have your colleagues as friends on facebook and they get to see all the drunken photos of you going back years. We all have something in the past that we'd rather stayed there; the only way a lot of people can function in society is because by and large it does stay there.
Giving people tools that make it easier to keep private things from being seen by prospective employers, parents, the world at large is a good thing. However, the centralized nature still means that Google gets to see everything -- as well as anybody else Google lets in on it.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
'Nobody has succeeded in building a social network that can offer those kinds of privacy protections yet.'
I can't believe that at all. Diaspora has clearly become a huge success. That's why all of my friends, neighbors, and even my frail old aunt and uncle are using it.
Diaspora has also shown the power of Ruby on Rails, and how easy it is to use Rails to create web sites that are bug-free and totally without security issues.
Diaspora is where it's at. Diaspora is the future. Once Diaspora and Bitcoin are integrated, it'll be an unstoppable force of social change.
All that yammering about privacy that can't be provided by Google+ but no actual references. Here is the full excerpt from TFA:
With that clarified: I thought that some of the distributed social networking projects offered exactly that (superb privacy capabilities). Regardless, Google+ seems to be a step in the right direction. Maybe not what everyone wants or needs, but a decent start.
I've been largely assembling circles these past couple days and was undecided about uploading an actual picture of me because there's no way to suppress that from being visible to people outside my circles. Sure, Google's put out an informative privacy center but I'm pretty sure in Facebook there is a way to hide nearly everything from people searching for you on the site.
... but not when you're on a low performance computer. Granted, it was probably a lot lighter than Flash, I'm not interested in a social network that's going to include elaborate animations for very simple actions. At least give me a way to disable that.
Google seems to be offering me a different strategy. I found the option to make my profile unsearchable but if someone got a hold of the crazy URL for my profile, they can see my name and picture without being in my profile. I'd rather be searchable and when unknown people find my profile they don't get much (maybe my name and nothing else) until they add me to their circle and I subsequently add them to mine. I think this is the desired functionality of nearly all my friends and that's how we use Facebook.
I haven't said anything about this as when I first joined, I could not even control the access to my picasa albums as they were automatically imported. This was particularly worrisome as I had some photos of my family around Christmas so I just deleted the albums. A few days later I saw the privacy controls though so I'm guessing the above should be added. Google+ is really undergoing a lot of changes still.
One complaint I had that isn't privacy related is how taxing the UI is. I just deleted a circle this morning and the action failed twice and then worked the third time. When it worked, there was a row of circles on my screen and the circle I deleted was pushed forward and rolled to the left in front of all the other circles off my screen and then the circles closed their ranks. Cute and pretty
My work here is dung.
Not exactly. Nobody can see who other people have put in their circles and that is the whole point of it: only you see how you have compartmentalized your contacts. In addition to that, if you don't have a Google+ profile (doesn't matter if you have a Google normal profile or any other email address), you can still be added to a Circle and when someone who has added your address in a Circle shares something into that particular Circle, you will only receive an e-mail with the message/video/thing shared and a link to join Google+. Nothing more than that.
When I went to use my invite, Google asked me for my birthdate, just one of those most imporant piecies of info for idenitity theft, I put in a fake one a usual only this time I made the mistake of making myself too young. Google then disabled my account AND my gmail account until I gave them 30 cents from my credit cart to prove I was old enough!!!!! So that led me to getting all of my email off of google via POP and saying fuck you goodbye.
(posted on my G+ wall last week, but I thought it might be worth pasting over here also)
There’s something creepy about Google+. It’s not so much what is seen on the surface. You have the power to manage your own user profile, the people you add to your circles, and what you want see. What you don’t have control over are the circles you are placed into by everyone else.
As users become more familiar with Google+, they will begin to create more specialized circles. For example, a sampling of circles I have currently have configured are "friends, family, acquaintances, following, paraglider pilots, hackers, makers, the press, ceo’s." Someone else might have me classified in their circles under “pilot” or “robot hacker” or “exboyfriends” or “high school buddies”. Whenever someone adds you to a circle, they are essentially profiling you, and the more people who add you to their circles, the more detail the profile about you will become. This is not something visible to you nor I. It’s visible only to the wizard behind the curtain (Google) and whoever they wish (or are forced) to share this information.
In the near future, ads may be served which relate to you, yet have nothing to do with anything you ever posted or mentioned on the internet. Your Google+ friends have inadvertently ratted you out.
So, who is really in control of your profile?