Google+ and Privacy: A Roundup(33bits.org)
33bits.org
Google+ and Privacy: A Roundup
http://33bits.org/2011/07/03/google-and-privacy-a-roundup/
5 comments
> Their real-world relationships use very different names, but G+ forces them to pick only one.
G+ profiles have nicknames. Wouldn't that be suitable for this scenario?
G+ profiles have nicknames. Wouldn't that be suitable for this scenario?
As far as I can tell, the "Nickname" and "Other names" fields are only displayed in the profile; there's no way to say "this should be the name displayed by my posts/in the Circles view/whatever"
Send a suggestion using the feedback button to Google. They have been really open to hearing from people and listening to feedback about various bugs and usability.
"Another reason why Google+ competes with distributed social networks: for people worried about the social networking service provider (or the Government) reading their posts, client-side encryption on top of Google+ could work. The Circles feature is exactly what is needed to make encrypted posts viable, because you can make a circle of those who are using a compatible encryption/decryption plugin. At least a half-dozen such plugins have been created over the years (examples: 1, 2), but it doesn’t make much sense to use these over Facebook or Twitter. Once the Google+ developer API rolls out, I’m sure we’ll see yet another avatar of the encrypted status message idea, and perhaps the the n-th time will be the charm."
I really like this idea. I hope they even implement it themselves so you can encrypt the data yourself on certain circles.
I also agree that Google+ so far seems that it could threaten not just Facebook, but also Twitter and Linkedin and maybe even personal blogging (Tumblr, Posterous, Blogger, and Wordpress to a lesser degree)
It could become a publisher platform too if they create a good way to monetize the content without being spammy. Chris Brogan suggested affiliate links. I was also thinking they could allow you yo use your own Adsense id on the page of the post.
But they should think all these things through before they implement them. Oh, and I'm STILL waiting for content search within Google+, the way Twitter search works.
I really like this idea. I hope they even implement it themselves so you can encrypt the data yourself on certain circles.
I also agree that Google+ so far seems that it could threaten not just Facebook, but also Twitter and Linkedin and maybe even personal blogging (Tumblr, Posterous, Blogger, and Wordpress to a lesser degree)
It could become a publisher platform too if they create a good way to monetize the content without being spammy. Chris Brogan suggested affiliate links. I was also thinking they could allow you yo use your own Adsense id on the page of the post.
But they should think all these things through before they implement them. Oh, and I'm STILL waiting for content search within Google+, the way Twitter search works.
I think G+ will threaten Twitter quite a bit. I love being able to add people I don't know to my "following" circle and then watch people post interesting, deeper updates than 140 characters would ever allow. All the "hacks" like twitpic, tweetlonger, etc are no longer needed. So far my experience with G+ is basically "it's Twitter except it's useful"
Glad you liked it. I'm not sure if I'll have time to implement it myself (I'm an academic.. more time for writing than hacking :-)) but I've worked on a very related project called SocialKeys: http://www.iab.org/wp-content/IAB-uploads/2011/03/arvind_nar...
It's been on hiatus for a while.. maybe this would be a good time to restart it.
It's been on hiatus for a while.. maybe this would be a good time to restart it.
Regarding encryption. Google+ with such a plugin wouldn't fix the fundamental problem. We don't need "encryption for geeks", we need "encryption for everyone".
Until we have a social network where every message posted is only viewable by the sender and the intended recipients, there will always be room for improvement.
Until we have a social network where every message posted is only viewable by the sender and the intended recipients, there will always be room for improvement.
google is in an excellent position for this: they "only" have to assign a keypair to every profile. there's a small problem in that the private key would have to be stored in their cloud for good usability, but it's otherwise possible.
They're not going to do that though because of their commercial interests. And a key stored by the service provider is equivalent to a service provider storing the data unencrypted and promising to not look at it. Just like Dropbox.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and all those started life as experiments and evolved to become what they have today. Google+ is the first product I’ve seen that is designed and implemented in the acknowledgement of the outcomes of those experiments, having made some mature decisions about what it is people actually want from social networking. I feel like the web is finally starting to grow up.
Much like the Google search engine was a calculated and intelligent response to Lycos, Altavista, Infoseek, etc.
And Gmail was a calculated and intelligent response to Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail?
Actually, yeah. I guess "coming last but being awesome" is one of Google's tactics.
Hm, yeah. Wave being an exception and considerably less successful.
Arvind, I had JUST published a blog post on this very topic, though not nearly as articulate or in-depth, when I saw this. All very well said indeed, and agree on all fronts.
I think all can agree that Circles is a great technology; the struggle for Google is going to be 1. convincing most of the world that there is an alternative to the all-or-nothing default of Facebook, and 2. that it is good. Great write-up.
I think all can agree that Circles is a great technology; the struggle for Google is going to be 1. convincing most of the world that there is an alternative to the all-or-nothing default of Facebook, and 2. that it is good. Great write-up.
I'm not going to argue for full-on bullet-proof pseudonyms, because I'm sure that would just be a matter of creating multiple accounts. The issue I have (and a wide variety of the "privacy conscious early adopters" using the system, I'm sure) is smaller: there's people I've been hanging out with online for the better part of a decade, and I know them by their pseudonyms. Google+ gives me a list of names I only barely recognise, instead of the familiar handles I've come to associate with these faces. Likewise, it would be nice if my user tile could show up in my parent's Circles with my given name, and my online friends' circles with my handle.
As another example, I have some friends of Chinese descent who have a "Chinese name" given to them by their parents, and an "English name" they use in non-Chinese-speaking contexts for the benefit of people who are inexperienced at pronouncing Chinese words. Their real-world relationships use very different names, but G+ forces them to pick only one.
A long-standing HN favourite post is patio11's "List of wrong assumptions programmers make about names", and one of the items on that list is "A person has exactly one name that they go by". This is exactly the assumption that Google+ makes, and it's just as wrong as ever. Circles is a great model for real human networks, but it doesn't go far enough: a single person can quite legitimately be known by different names in different social contexts.
As for myself, I've changed my Google Profile's "name" field to reflect my usual psuedonym, because more than half of my current G+ contacts know me that way. But I'll keep complaining about it, because I think it's an important part of human society that is being overlooked.