The Phantoms of Google+

theodp writes "Engadget reports that Google wants a patent on its System and Method for Generating a Ghost Profile for a Social Network. The brainchild of five Googlers, the invention is designed to convert anti-social-networking types to the joys of Google+ and its ilk. From the patent: 'A problem arises when users of social networks are friends with people that are opposed to social networks. The second group misses out on an important social component. For example, many users only share their photos on a social networking site. As a result, users that do not want to join the social network are forced to either join with reservations or miss out on the social component, such as viewing pictures.' By generating an unsearchable 'ghost profile' when a member of the social network invites a Google+ adverse friend to join, Google explains, non-believers get to participate in social networking activities without providing user information."

Comments

nope

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a grab to boost G+'s userbase beyond Wil Wheaton and Google engineers.

Not gonna touch Google+ until they get rid of their "real names" policy and I'm not inclined since I've invested so much of my online social life with Facebook.

Re:nope

[Chrisq]

Sounds like a grab to boost G+'s userbase beyond Wil Wheaton and Google engineers.

Not gonna touch Google+ until they get rid of their "real names" policy and I'm not inclined since I've invested so much of my online social life with Facebook.

Do you use your real name on Facebook? Seriously a lot of people complain about the "real name" policy even though they use it openly on Facebook. This may or may not be hypocritical, I suppose if you keep your porn collection on Picasa....

Re:nope

[cayenne8]

I don't get what people out there think.....somehow it must be groupthink that if you're not on FB and/or Google+ or twitter or xyz social network, that you are being left behind in the dark ages, alone in the cold with no contact with human life any longer.....that you have lost every friend you've gathered in life to this point.

Seriously, I don't have any accounts on these networks, and I don't intend to, there is just too much trade of IMHO, for my privacy.....to join up on one of these. I mean, even with a fake name.....they've shown they can figure out who you are with who you associate...etc.

Seriously, I've not missed an even with any of my friends...I've not missed a picture I'd want to see.....

I stil do this weird thing, and see my close friends regularly in meatspace....I call them, I email directly with them, sometimes *gasp* with multiple of us on the same email thread?!?!

This way...the conversation, pics and what-have-you...are just between us and not out for the rest of the world to gawk at, and have corporations (and governments) use all that info to advertise or worse at me.

Seriously....it isn't painful.....I don't miss a thing.

Re:nope

[Overzeetop]

There are two possibilities:

(1) all your friends are Luddites, too.

(2) you are the person everyone complains about and has to spend extra time tracking down because you're the only one not using the new technology.

If you want to skip the whole FB/G+ thing, it's not a huge deal. But please, don't complain if you start getting left out of shit. I know some people like you and, quite honestly, I tend to simply not invite them to do meatspace stuff half the time. It's too much effort. Part of my being able to run a business, sit on two artistic boards of directors, one community service board, have time to play with my 9 year old, share stories with my relatives and friends on four continents is because I don't waste time on arranging stuff with every person individually. I know phone trees were all the rage in the 1960s (and, yes, the phone company is tracking who you contact, by the way), and chain letters may have been useful in the 19th century (still mostly untrackable if you use the USPS, though that's mostly due to gross incompetence).

I'm sure there are still lots of places where personal interaction for all of your interpersonal communications is manageable and commonplace. Just realize that if you have friends who are on social sites, they're probably leaving you out - intentionally or unintentionally - because if you're not on them you're simply not around for all of the conversations.

This G+ thing may be just a way to entice naysayers into the fold so they can rape their privacy for cold hard advertising cash. Or it may be a way to show the naysayers that there really are good things happening (i hopes that someday they can rape your privacy for cold hard advertising cash). It may just be a way to show FB users how much (they hope) they're missing by not being on G+.

Re:nope

[Anonymous Coward]

How does wanting to have real and personal contact with people make them luddites? I didn't think forming and maintaining relationships was something that could become outdated.

People like you are sad and self-centred. The fact that you think you're so important that people are going to be left out validates that. If a friend can't take a couple minutes out of their oh so busy day to contact me personally, then they are no friend at all and I would rather be "left out" of their dealings.

This is the only redeeming value I place in social networks, their existence sometimes helps me to weed out the fake from the real. I haven't gotten to the point of outright rejecting people as friends because they want to use social networks but if someone ever pulled the crap you do, I remove them from my life.

Relationships aren't something that automatically last. They require nurturing and care. If you're too busy to take care of them, they wither and die.

Re:nope

[epyT-R]

1. all your friends are clueless about the privacy concerns or just don't give a damn for consequences in general.

2. you are the person everyone complains about because he's always too busy playing 'social' rather than BEING social, like actually doing things with his friends.

If you want to bandwagon hop on to every new e-thingie churned out by corpgovX, it's not a huge deal. But please, don't complain if you are judged out of context on information you put up there 10 years ago under completely different life circumstances and cultural status quo. These include judgment by current/potential employers, law enforcement agents, banks, and insurance companies. Just because it's innocuous today does not mean it will always be. I know some people like you, and quite honestly, they're very cavalier about others' personal information, posting pics without permission (fb and google are doing automated face recog or will be soon) and talking about personal issues online for all to see. People like you trade their friends' privacy for personal convenience, and then justify it with little more than a flippant attitude and self-serving arrogance. It's not worth having such people as friends. Using strawman arguments to further your case when pressed does little to bolster the lack of respect you've already engendered.

I'm sure there are lots of situations where personal information ends up public knowledge as a result of normal human interaction, but this is not the same as such data being stored and transmutated in corporate/government databases, accumulating over time, until used by someone who wants control over your behavior in some way, often by misrepresenting facts, much as you've done here.

This G+ thing is a way of forcing those who have conciously opted out to join out of attrition, because now the data will be collected whether they put it there or not. The process will take longer and likely will not be as specific/useful as the accounts owned by morons who post their entire lives online, but the info could still end up damaging. This is true even if it is incorrect because it place the 'ghost' person in a reactionary position of having to fight with the provider to correct it and save face.

Re:nope

[swillden]

I find social networking to be most useful not so much with friends (though it's great there, allowing me to stay in touch with many more people than I could without it), but with family. Perhaps you don't come from a large family, but I do, and my wife does, and our combined extended families exceed 200 people. We're only close to maybe 50 of them, but sufficiently close to all of them that keeping updated about important life events -- jobs, kids, illnesses, etc. -- is of great value to all of us. And with social networks we can have much more frequent interactions than that. I have cousins I wouldn't normally speak to for more than a few minutes per year at family reunions, but with Google+ I "talk" to them multiple times per week.

I also find it to be a great way to keep in touch with old acquaintances. Over the course of my 40+ years of life, I've accumulated a lot of friends who've since moved of my life, but I like them and am interested in what they're doing and thinking.

By lowering the effort required to connect and communicate, social networking applications make it feasible to be connected to more people -- and lots of people like that! You may prefer to have only a very small circle of very close friends and avoid others, but if so you're the exception, not the rule. I have a small number of friends that I talk to daily, one way or another. But I keep in touch with a much larger group of people, and social networks make it possible for me to keep in touch with even more.

Go to hell, Borg overlords

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple as that.

I'm not joining. You won't monetize or profile me. If that means I quit sharing certain things with social junkies, then so be it.

I'm not your datapoint and I never will be.

Re:Go to hell, Borg overlords

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not your datapoint and I never will be.

Says who? You? Since when were you the law?

You are valuable data whether you want to be or not.
This includes mail records of you acceptability for certain mail by coalitions (such as vouchers, sports mailing list previews, spam and various other things), insurance, medical, hell, even in some cases "threat level" if you ever hit any flags.

Somebody can sit there on the side of a road, recording you and thousands of others going past in cars, recording said information without your permission.
Want to know why? Because you are on public property.
Despite what you (and many others sadly) think, the internet is public property if it contains 3rd party access. Unless that site is fully-contained within its own domain, you are free to be recorded, marked and scrutinized by whatever, whenever.
As long as that information isn't published to others directly, they are free to manipulate it for whatever nefarious purposes.
Google, nor do most of the hundreds of other advertising agencies, directly identify people in ad networking systems.

So, please, don't worry your head over it. Government-mandated records contain far more information on you than Google could ever hope to get from you.
From your dental health to your shoe-buying habits.
Everyone always calls Britain the Big Brother country, the Police-State. Most governments record these things. Some far more, some far less.
The UK barely even has any CCTV, actually. And most of them in those stupid reports were PRIVATE cameras. The silly thing was making it out like there was a camera in every street corner or something... hilarious if you ask me.

If you are really that paranoid over Google, god forbid you could get access to all your records. Stacks upon stacks of folders on everyone, still recorded on paper in the unlikely event that our entire electrical infrastructures fail and we lose everything. (not sure why "Steve McRobertson bought a candied Apple, milk and bacon in 1978" would be useful for any long-term reasons")
You might as well just fake your death and go live in some random forest, the forests don't care about stalking you. Unless it is those damned forests in horror stories who want to gobble up little children. WHY

Re:Go to hell, Borg overlords

[Charliemopps]

You already are a data point. You've no idea how sophisticated the software that monitors what you do has gotten. I was recently involved in an integration with some of this sort of software on a site that gets a couple of million hits a day. It's amazing what they can do. If you go to a website, they will, regardless of your desires, browser settings, even proxies, know exactly what you do while there, and if you come back. They then share all this with other companies to build a profile of you. The simple fact that you say you don't want to be tracked ironically gives them an excuse to track you. They have to log your desire to not be tracked right? Then the store all your website activity by other methods, like IP Address, browser, OS, and a hundred other data points.... which builds a profile of you, without building a profile of you. They can claim this is just standard logging for security. Then, if you ever enter your email address or phone number on the site, they make the convenient assumption that you've changed your mind about your privacy. And here's the kicker, they don't just assume you've changed your mind going forward, they assume you've change your mind about the past to! So they drag up all your past traffic and attach it to your email address. Everything you do on the web is tracked and logged in excruciating detail by marketing departments all over the world. So far we're lucky that the government hasn't gotten access to this data yet, but it's only a matter of time.

Re:Go to hell, Borg overlords

[Goaway]

And then you get angry at them when they provide you with a way to AVOID giving them information?

Re:Go to hell, Borg overlords

[kent_eh]

You are valuable data whether you want to be or not.

I am intentionally an inaccurate datapoint.

I know I can't control that a lot of information is being collected without my knowledge or consent.
So whenever I do get a choice, I'll provide information that is either inaccurate, ambiguous, or flat out contradictory to what is already known about me.

The more polluted their databases are, the less valuable it is to them, and thus the less influence they have over my life.
At least that's my hypothesis.

Re:Go to hell, Borg overlords

[93 Escort Wagon]

I am intentionally an inaccurate datapoint.

I know I can't control that a lot of information is being collected without my knowledge or consent.
So whenever I do get a choice, I'll provide information that is either inaccurate, ambiguous, or flat out contradictory to what is already known about me.

The more polluted their databases are, the less valuable it is to them, and thus the less influence they have over my life.

At least that's my hypothesis.

Sorry to tell you this - but it's not working, Mr. James Harrison of Baltimore, Maryland.

Uh...

[Black Parrot]

Remind me again why I want to participate in social networking?

This is the biggest / most ridiculous case of "because it's there" in the history of our species.

Re:Uh...

[MightyYar]

Remind me again why I want to participate in social networking?

Convenience?

It's much easier to just go to facebook when I need to contact someone rather than keep their information up-to-date in at least one address book.

It's much easier to post a baby announcement on facebook than to send out individual emails.

Casual multiplayer games are much more fun when your friends are the opponents (e.g. Words with Friends).

Re:Uh...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been (and deep-down still am) one of these anti-social-network types. Sadly, I felt that I had no other choice but to create a Facebook profile after friends and family started using it to discuss plans and all sorts of stuff, and I kept being the last person to find out about, well... everything. I still get a sickening feeling from how basically such a large part of my social life now takes place on a for-profit company's website whose apparent clients are advertisers and I am the product it is offering, but it was litterally becoming a choice between being a social outcast or joining Facebook.. sigh. :|

Re:Uh...

[shutdown -p now]

And if it was 100 years ago, you'd be forced to get a phone if you didn't want to become a social outcast, too. The reason for the uptake of all this tech is really simple: it makes communication more convenient. No, really, it does, and people who keep suggesting "group email" etc just don't get it - it's like saying that you shouldn't be using a text processor because doing so only indicates that you're too lazy to learn how to type with a typewriter.

The problem with this round is that the tech comes with considerable strings attached. In theory, phone calls are also data-minable, it's just that we didn't have the capability to do so efficiently back then. Today, we have that, and we don't even need it that advanced any more because the (mostly text + some images) social networking communications are trivial to extract useful information from. So it gets done. Many geeks are rightly worried about that - but they make for an insignificant minority, and most people really don't care if their personal information ends up in a database somewhere; all they care is for that information to not come out and embarrass them (and they will be very mad if and when it does - but not until then).

Finally!

[Georules]

This will be HUGE! We all already knew that G+ was a ghost town. Suddenly, G+ will have TONS of active ghost members.

Didn't get enough people at the party? Code them into the system instead. Oh, and patent it.

Yes, please, force me to be social

[Nyder]

Yes, force people who do NOT want to be social to be social, that is a great way to get product support.

Stupid fucking gits.

If that shit worked, I'd be religious.

Re:Yes, please, force me to be social

[TheRaven64]

Yes, force people who do NOT want to be social to be social

Please can we not conflate not wanting to be part of a massive centralised communications system controlled and monitored by a single unaccountable entity with not wanting to be social?

Re:centralization

[Anonymous Coward]

Its part of the urge to centralise.

  When we are presented with more distributed services such as email, setting up your own wordpress installation, or IRC server, everyone gives there entire online existence to google, twitter & facebook.

This is better because we are putting more, bigger eggs in the worlds largest basket, which doesn't have keep eggs safe on its agenda

Social Networking in General ...

[jabberwock]

... has done just an excellent job in separating out, among all my friends and acquaintances, those who want me to spend my life looking at their photographs or mouse-clicking through Zynga games. And it largely segregates them.

Works for me.

When will the Damn Real Name Meme Die?

[fast turtle]

I've been on G+ since it was incepted when the damn Meme about a real name started. Guess what. Google has never required a Real Name for it as long as you have a valid Log-In for their services. Those who only used GDocs/Gmail were fine. Even iGoogle (start page), Picasa or Google Groups worked if you had a log-in. The only service that has ever required a Real Name was Orkut due Brazil and the South American Problems. For EU/US/Asia, Orkut has been a non-starter as it's never been pushed for us to use it due to Picasa.

Re:When will the Damn Real Name Meme Die?

[Daetrin]

I've also been on G+ since it got started, and although i have managed to slip under the radar, several friends and people i know got nailed by the real name policy. Their algorithm for detecting "fake" names is crap, but the shit you have to deal with if you get targeted is real.

Re:When will the Damn Real Name Meme Die?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

No they did not. What they did was revoke the requirement to share your real name with everybody else on google+. They still require it internally, they just let you use one or more fake names for interacting with other people. That's only a marginal improvement because the database is still just as much a risk to your security.

It's only a problem because Google makes it one

[93 Escort Wagon]

As a result, users that do not want to join the social network are forced to either join with reservations or miss out on the social component, such as viewing pictures.

Why should anyone have to join a social network to view a friend's pictures? The only way this "problem" can exist is when the owners of the social network try to force artificial restrictions on the network.

If I post anything on Facebook - text, pictures, whatever - I can flag it as public, or I can limit access to some arbitrary group. If I want to share photos with someone who's not on Facebook, I will just mark them "public" (in practice, I tend to post my photos elsewhere; but that's beside the point). I can't imagine Google+ doesn't allow this as well - so either their network is artificially restricted in an attempt to force people into some affiliation, or else they are being disingenuous in this patent defense.

Re:It's only a problem because Google makes it one

[icebraining]

Duh, because people don't want to share with the public?

This is a way to limit access to those photos while at the same time giving access to people with a G+ account: they send you a private URL with which you can authenticate yourself without registering.

Hehe

[Barny]

/me checks the date

Sunday April 01, @02:58AM

Yeah, it's already begun.

Re:Marketers

[Ash-Fox]

As soon as the marketers get bored of abusing G+ for SEO purposes, it's going to die a quick death.

Can you give us a prediction when MySpace is going to die a quick death?

RTFA -- A for "Abstract" in this case.

[russotto]

As is par for slashdot, the summary contradicts the article -- "the invention is designed to convert anti-social-networking types to the joys of Google+" says the summary, whereas the patent abstract says "The ghost profile allows a user to use certain features in a social network without converting to a social network profile. "

In other words, the patent is for just the opposite of what the summary says it is for.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google. It's a big company; I had nothing to do with this patent.)