p2pnet - rss feed: Google, ’sharing,’ and you
p2pnet news | Freedom:- “Google Reader invades your privacy and it’s not going to stop,” says California lawyer Will Chen in a headline on his on his WiseBread blog.
So what else is new?
Anyway, “you might recall the Beacon scandal where Facebook shared its users’ online shopping history with all their friends on Facebook,” says Chen, but, “Instead of learning from Facebook’s mistakes, rumor has it that Google is considering a similar move.”
Here, Chen quotes TechCrunch as saying:
… Google has contacted at least one Facebook Beacon partner, and perhaps more, in an effort to drum up support for its own initiative for OpenSocial, which it is calling “universal activity streams.”
These ‘universal activity streams’ are meant to combine all actions you take online, similar to Facebook’s Beacon, and present them as a line of text in your personal activity feed on Google or an OpenSocial partner site like MySpace or Bebo. Within Google, for instance, these feeds could appear in Gmail, iGoogle, or Google Reader. The universal activity stream is expected to launch around February or March of next year.
Or as p2pnet put it, “Don’t look now, but Google is about to match you up with products to make life easier …
“… for advertisers, that is. Not you.”
It’s, “rolling out a centralized profile system that will provide personalized information to each Google product you use,” we said, also quoting TechCrunch.
We went on:
Says butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-our-mouth Google:
A Google Profile is simply how you represent yourself on Google products - it lets you tell others a bit more about who you are and what you’re all about. You control what goes into your Google Profile, sharing as much (or as little) as you’d like.
Use multiple Google products? Soon your Google Profile will link up with these as well.
Gosh! Thanks! Won’t that be fun?
But hold on a minute.
Are you a signed up Googler? And if you are, did you ever agree to have yourself and your data hooked up with products Google clients are advertising?
And shouldn’t, “will provide personalized information to each Google product you us” actually read, “will provide personalized information to the owners and/or advertisers of each Google product you use”?
Is this in any way akin to the Facebook effort when Zuckerberg, et al, tried, and failed, to follow its users around the Net so it’d know what they were up to, as well as where and when?
Said Kurt Wismer in a Reader’s Write:
no, it’s not akin to that at all … a) there is no involvement with 3rd party sites, b) there’s no mention of keeping track of what you do (although it’s well known that google keeps logs of what people do in google’s services/’products’) only what services/’products’ you use, and c) you’ll supposedly be able to share as much or as little as you want …
this basically means there’s going to be a page with my name on it that says i use blogger and reader and calendar and a bunch of other google services/’products’ if i so choose ...
Meanwhile, “These ‘universal activity streams’ are meant to combine all actions you take online, similar to Facebook’s Beacon, and present them as a line of text in your personal activity feed on Google or an OpenSocial partner site like MySpace or Bebo. Within Google, for instance, these feeds could appear in Gmail, iGoogle, or Google Reader,” Chen has TechCrunch saying. “The universal activity stream is expected to launch around February or March of next year.”
But, Chen continues, “This move with Google Reader is only the first step towards the ‘universal activity stream.’ If we don’t stand up to Google now, they will make their expanded definition of sharing the default for all your other privacy information, such as search results, map queries, Google Docs, Google Notebook, or god forbid, Google Health.”
He points out that earlier this year, a Privacy International report had Google as the only company to completely fail a six-month PI investigation into privacy practices employed by key Net-based companies, going on >>>
Here are some of Google’s worst offenses:
- Google maintains records of all search strings and the associated IP-addresses and time stamps for at least 18 to 24 months and does not provide users with an expungement option. While it is true that many US based companies have not yet established a time frame for retention, there is a prevailing view amongst privacy experts that 18 to 24 months is unacceptable, and possibly unlawful in many parts of the world.
- Google has access to additional personal information, including hobbies, employment, address, and phone number, contained within user profiles in Orkut. Google often maintains these records even after a user has deleted his profile or removed information from Orkut.
- Google logs search queries in a manner that makes them personally identifiable but fails to provide users with the ability to edit or otherwise expunge records of their previous searches.
- Google fails to give users access to log information generated through their interaction with Google Maps, Google Video, Google Talk, Google Reader, Blogger and other services.
Google’s Arrogant Defense
The worst part of this whole ordeal is Google’s unwillingness to recognize they did something wrong. In response to angry complaints in its feedback forum, Google came up with this excuse:
The “share” feature was always intended to imply some amount of publicity. That’s why we used the term “share” and had shared items marked as public by default on the Settings > Tags page. Google Reader Guide.
This is what Google is talking about. In the old system, the items you choose to share are published on a page with a obfuscated URL like this:
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/45388×91944y71z67112 (not an actual working link, just an example).
You “share” this link by explicitly telling your friend about this URL. Technically speaking, this page can be accessed by anyone who knows the address. That’s what Google means when it claims the old system “imply some amount of publicity.”
But come on. Look at that URL. If you were not told about that URL, there’s no way you could access that page. Clearly the 20 random numbers in the URL is an indication that some amount of privacy is expected, and that we want the URL to be seen only by people we explicitly shared it with.
Now Google wants to expand the definition of “shared” to include anyone you have ever chatted with on Google Talk (or worse, anyone you’ve ever emailed, if your Gmail setting automatically adds anyone you’ve emailed to your Google Talk contact list).
After getting hundreds of complaints, the Google team brushed off their concerns with this little gem:
All of us on the Reader team are paying attention and are aware of the feedback from this group. However, we do need to balance all these concerns with keeping the feature useful for those who like it and use it. (There aren’t many of those on this thread, granted, but this is only a small subset of the people using this feature.) (emphasis mine)
An angry Google user gave this blistering response:
The way these people have handled the current user feedback has shown that they are in reality *not* interested in hearing what people think, contrary to what the original post says. It would be safe to say that regardless of what kind of feedback they get, it will be in the minority because most people don’t care that much about the services they use.
So the people that give feedback will automatically, by their very nature of caring, be in the minority. Saying that they can’t really take such groups into account means that they were in fact lying when they said they wanted feedback.
But who needs feedback when you know your company does no evil?
Who indeed …….
Definitely stay tuned.
Jon Newton - p2pnet
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