Google Wrestles With Privacy Bugs In Google+ 163
CWmike writes "Google's new social networking site, Google+ — built to beat Facebook primarily on privacy features — has several privacy bugs the company is working to fix. While some enthusiastic beta testers clamor for Google to open the social networking site to everybody now, it's clear Google needs to address these issues before launching Google+ more broadly. Stumbling right out of the gate over privacy problems would likely doom Google+'s chances of emerging as a viable, realistic rival to Facebook, which rules the social networking market with about 700 million account holders. So far, beta testers have been mostly positive about Google+, particularly over its design to make it easier for users to share posts and content with different sets of people, as opposed with their entire list of contacts. Many of the existing privacy bugs in Google+ revolve around the site's mechanism to block users, according to this published list."
At least it's not like Buzz (Score:3)
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I have never used my "real" identity with Google, I do not know where you are getting the idea that you must?
Unlike Facebook, which actively would delete accounts made representing your virtual identities and insist on verifying real information.
The later was useless to me, as my entire presence for decades is based on me, not my real name (which happens to co-exist with a celebrity, making it useless).
With Google thankfully, there is no name requirement, no verification, no cross referencing, just me, and
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I have never used my "real" identity with Google, I do not know where you are getting the idea that you must?
Perhaps "force" is too strong a word, but it's certainly an attempt to encourage you to do so with some steps taken to enforce the encouragement.
The gripe i have in particular is that everything seems to be pretty publicly linked with your Google email account. In order to to use Buzz and now presumably Google+ you have to create a Google Profile and provide a "real" name. There's nothing stopping you from providing a fake name in the profile of course, but it's going to be publicly linked with your emai
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Personally I'd encourage people to use their real identities too whatever possible (I do). Yes, I know it is not always possible in the real world. Many of the problems can be fixed, but of course many of the fixes. will take time.
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The later was useless to me, as my entire presence for decades is based on me, not my real name (which happens to co-exist with a celebrity, making it useless).
Is that celebrity some no-talent ass clown [imdb.com]?
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The later was useless to me, as my entire presence for decades is based on me, not my real name (which happens to co-exist with a celebrity, making it useless).
Let me guess: Michael Bolton?
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Create new Google Account. Join Google+, fill with profile with random data.
As soon as you add friends to your circles, or your friends add you to their circles, then they will be able to determine enough about you by inference.
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I'm not saying it's impossible to be at least somewhat private using Google+ and I'm not saying that people shouldn't be able to be public and share that kind of info if they want, but the fact that Goo
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If you have an issue with your real identity being too easy for people to "infer" when you're using a fake name on a social network... I'm thinking social networks aren't for you. What, are you Batman?
"as opposed with their entire list of contacts" (Score:4, Insightful)
Is this seriously a positive point? I've been able to select and block specific groups on my status messages, images, albums, etc. on Facebook for at least the last two years.
Come to think about it, Circles in Google+ are simply Facebook Lists and Groups merged together in disguise. I get better permission granularity, get all the group chat features I want in Groups... am I simply not seeing the allure Google+ supposedly offers? I'm all for tossing Facebook, but in all honesty, another centralized platform (especially one owned by an advertisement near-deity) just seems like a terrible idea.
I wouldn't mind an update on Diaspora right about now.
Re:"as opposed with their entire list of contacts" (Score:5, Informative)
Come to think about it, Circles in Google+ are simply Facebook Lists and Groups merged together in disguise. I get better permission granularity, get all the group chat features I want in Groups... am I simply not seeing the allure Google+ supposedly offers?
A web UI that's convenient and easy to use. Facebook's privacy settings for posting are buried too deep to be handy. Facebook lists are also a lot more tedious to set up; in Google+ you can assign people to circles easily from many places, including the notification that they have added you.
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If you think about it, Circles is just an implementation of GMail's labels applied to contacts.
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I'd love a Diaspora update, too, but in the last three months I've seen precisely zero activity there. Could just be my friends... but there is an uneasy balance between attracting/retaining enough people to get networking effects, and still ensuring their privacy. One thing I like about Google+ is it starts out with limited posting and limited circles and you have to work to reduce your privacy. It appears to me that Facebook has worked in exactly the opposite manner: you have to work to block and filte
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I'd love a Diaspora update, too, but in the last three months I've seen precisely zero activity there.
Diapsora development is active with daily commits https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/commits/master [github.com].
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I'd love a Diaspora update, too.
IANAWD, but a few weeks ago I heard Raphael Sofaer and Dan Grippi do a presentation on Diaspora. They said they're hoping for a release version by the end of the year. One reason they said they're keeping a low profile is that they don't want to worry about scaling problems at the moment. There are other problems too, such as that its a bit of a pain to set up a pod, right now. They seem like cool, smart guys. They've got bigger goals than just duplicating facebook's functionality, but I didn't take go
Re:"as opposed with their entire list of contacts" (Score:5, Informative)
As have I, however it is difficult and leaves you open to holes.
Specifically with Facebook, everyone is part of the "Friends" list, and you can't remove people from it without unfriending them, at which point they can see nothing. Some set of people you may not want to see all of your posts, so you can create a list and put people in these blocked lists. However, these changes are not retroactive. So if you create a group later on, you can't deny visibility of older posts to people in that group, and then you get into a complex mess of exceptions and multiple lists with different rules.
Now with Google+ these visibility settings are not retroactive either, however until you place someone in a group that a post is visible to they cannot see any posts. They are in a limbo-like "unclassified" state, only able to see public posts. As you place them into groups, their post visibility increases. Then if you want to really get complex you can create different circles, which are much easier to target with posts than general posts with lots of visibility rules that have to be applied.
After all, some people are more acquaintances or professional contacts whereas some people are friends and yet others are family. So you can much more tightly control what people can see, and who can see it. An easy way to think of it, at least for a Slashdotter, is the difference between a firewall that defaults to ALLOW and specifies what to DENY, versus a firewall that defaults to DENY and specifies what to ALLOW. One of these ways is more secure than the other. Google+, at first glance, seems to default to the more secure way.
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What I don't understand is why you'd want to hide older posts from newer members. Mailing lists (at least all the couple hundred I've been a member of over the years) work in exactly that way (join or be invited or added to the list and you get full access) and has never caused any problems.
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One question regarding google+, let's say I make a group, and we post in it, then I remove "bob" from the group, write "jesus, bob's a retard isn't he?" then add him back in, will he:
a) see the message because you're allowing everyone within a group to see all messages retroactively, or
b) he won't see the message because he wasn't allowed at the time of writing to see it.
Which is it?
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I was under the impression that circles are specific to you, where Facebook's groups are not. In other words, if I have a circle called 'friends', and Joe has a circle called 'friends', Joe can be in my 'friends' circle without me being in his. Plus, groups take some effort to set up and such. I suppose that's what lists are for, but you don't get group chat and such with those. But Facebook groups always struck me as something designed for actual organizations. You'd make a group for your school club, not
Facebook friend lists are a pain to use!!! (Score:2)
That's why;
a) A lot of facebook users are not aware of the feature
b) Few users actually interact with them
The Friend Lists feature is badly designed from a usability standpoint. It is also pretty well hidden by facebook, and I don't mean that lists are hard to create (they're a pain compared to circle) but just the gymnastics users have to go through to use them with the padlock icon make this feature unusable to most.
It's also inconsistent on Facebook mobile. On their mobile webapp, it's not available, but
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The way circles are implemented is a killer feature for me. I interact with people in 3 languages, and some of them also speak several languages.
Putting them in different, non exclusive, circles allows me to filter what I post to people, for example so as not to spam English speakers with Spanish posts, but allowing those that speak English and Spanish to see posts in both languages.
At the same time I want to have people in different groups according to their relationship to me, so as not to talk about such
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If you want to share things with just your close family members, or just close friends, or just computer scientists... how do you do it? You create the respective lists. Initial problems.
- They will see the names of the groups and how you organized them (not good for "not so close friends", "hot girls" and the like).
- How do you find which pictures you've share with just a particular group of people?
But you also want to talk back and forth with them, wall style. You can restrict your wall to just certain li
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One thing I want is more control over who see's which photos I'm tagged in. (not my own photos).
I want to set visibility based on either the tagger or the owner of the photograph.
At the moment you set inclusion and exclude groups but it applies to ALL photos you are tagged in.
For example , I may go out with a rowdy bunch, and dont mind them seeing my less flattering moments, but I also want family to see more sedate photos I'm tagged in.
Facebook has taken all the fun out of getting irresponsibly drunk.
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Specifically, it takes me back to high school. It's fine and dandy, but half the goal of social networks is to keep networking, not to lock oneself to certain groups and isolate those groups from each other. I occasionally have a need to limit something to specific people, but I often want everyone to see my thoughts (as posted) to a) blend everyone's input together and b) give people an opportunity to expand their own social circles.
I just feel lik
Re:"as opposed with their entire list of contacts" (Score:5, Insightful)
Then just post to all your circles or go twitter style and post public.
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Specifically, it takes me back to high school. It's fine and dandy, but half the goal of social networks is to keep networking, not to lock oneself to certain groups and isolate those groups from each other.
Then put everyone on the same circle.
A whole lot of people like to be in isolated groups, however. We're not looking to "expand our own social circles", we're just looking for a way to better communicate with our existing social circles. I pretty much created three different facebook accounts because there were three very different groups of people I hang with, and I never, absolutely NEVER wanted to post anything on one of those groups that I also wanted to post on another. None of those accounts includ
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Just use "public" then...
(it suddenly occurs to me... Is it possible to have one contact belong to different groups at the same time? Like some nesting Venn Diagram of interconnected circles?)
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Yes...you're over thinking the circles concept. Each circle is just that...a circle on your "circles page" that you can drag and drop any of your contacts into. They don't interact with each other, nor do they take away any of your contacts from the general "contact pool" once that contact has been added to a particular circle.
If you really wanted to, I'm sure you could create a Vann Diagram to show the relations between all circles, but Google doesn't do that for you.
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If you want to share the same things in the same way with all of your acquaintances, by all means do it. But that's not how most people behave. To me, circles brings me back to the real world.
Facebook worked fine when it was mostly Uni students. This meant the contact list was somewhat uniform. But while in the beginning most shared pretty much anything over Facebook, I see more and more people now protecting their tagged photos, removing albums, disabling walls. They don't feel that comfortable sharing all
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My point is that the opt-in nature of being able to broadcast isolates thoughts and perspectives, defeating the very point of a social network.
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The concept is to network people together and allow for this network to replicate. How is this supposed to happen if the same people are seeing the same things? Broadcasts allow for an extended discussion by parties unfamiliar with each other, introducing people to others they might normally have never met. That's one of the points of social networking, and that's what I'm trying to say. Circles in Google+ discourage this
Control... (Score:2)
The problem with facebook, is that its a single site controlled by a single entity...
Google+ would just be transferring that control to Google instead of facebook...
What we need, is something open and decentralised.
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What we need, is something open and decentralised.
Oh you mean that Dia...whatsitname that no one gives a shit about anymore?
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Google Wave was open, decentralized and worked quite well. Didn't take off, though.
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I give less a shit about google's 'products' since we know they are not trustable.
really, given how horrible FB has turned out to be, why do we insist on trying to make a 'better' one? it can't work. any company involved will 'monetize' it and ruin it. therefore, any corp owned discussion forum (call it what you will) is crap by definition.
not giving google a chance here. why? anyone really think it will be 'so much different' from what we have today from other vendors and wannabees?
if you have a list
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I give less a shit about google's 'products' since we know they are not trustable.
See, there's the difference between you and me - I think Google are trustable. They had a few cockups with Buzz and Streetview but were very frank about them and dealt with them swiftly. To me, these were genuine errors.
On the other hand, I don't trust Facebook. My major gripe is that they allow the owners of "applications" (quizzes and other time wasters) to access a lot of my data that I thought I had shared with my friends only. This was not obvious at all to me when I installed some applications an
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There are a few advantages to Google over Facebook in this regard: Google has proven to be reasonably competent about their popular services, and Google is not desperate for cash. Of course they'll monetize it, but they're doing that already anyway. They know how to monetize stuff without ruining it, unlike Facebook.
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Besides, it's not like you have to use Google+, Facebook, or either. Competition just creates choice. It doesn't force change.
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If only there was a tool where we could all host (or serve) our own Pages.. We could link them together, almost like a web of pages. Of course, it would have to have standards, follow established protocols, and have a tool to "browse" the pages.
hmmmm
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If only there was a tool where we could all host (or serve) our own Pages.. We could link them together, almost like a web of pages. Of course, it would have to have standards, follow established protocols, and have a tool to "browse" the pages.
hmmmm
From http://geocities.yahoo.com/index.php [yahoo.com]
The GeoCities service is no longer available, but there's a lot more to explore on Yahoo!
Bug #1 (Score:5, Insightful)
Surely giving all you personal information to Google is a privacy bug?
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Based on..what?
Historically, they have. Also, if you choose to leave you can export your info, and they delete you from there system, completely.
Of course if you share private information in a system people look at, then yeah, you loose privacy, but that's your OWN damn fault.
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I wish I had mod points. I totally agree that Google is not going to respect my privacy.
Why not? They've been pretty good about that thus far. When was the last time google shared your information with a third party?
Hell, their business model depends on keeping information about people to themselves. They don't want the advertisers to know who might be interested in their product. If they had a list, they'd advertise straight to us, and skip google as the middle-men. They want to tell the advertisers, "we know of people's habits and know people who might interested in buying from you. Pa
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If you discount the governments of the world, you are right: Google never shares your data with anybody. They prefer to sell it, since it's their primary business model.
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Why not? They've been pretty good about that thus far. When was the last time google shared your information with a third party?
we can't know!
you and I don't have a sniffer on their backbone trunks. we can't know what they do once we hit enter.
no idea at all. why on earth would you assume benevolence on a mega-corp? you new here?
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I wish I had mod points. I totally agree that $COMPANY is not going to respect my privacy.
insanity: repeating the same thing and expecting different results.
Also.... (Score:2)
From TFA:
Well that didn't take long. They've gone from the anti-Facebook to being exactly like Facebook in the space of about a week. Paint me not surprised.
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Looks like you didn't have a chance to try Google+. For nearly every bit of your profile information there, you can specify how widely it can be shared. I guess they want to migrate the now redundant functionality to their new shiny service.
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Looks like you didn't have a chance to try Google+. For nearly every bit of your profile information there, you can specify how widely it can be shared. I guess they want to migrate the now redundant functionality to their new shiny service.
I also see an implication that anyone with a private google profile will be issued a G+ invite before 7/31? Or maybe G+ will be wide open to the entire public before 7/31?
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Apparently verbs can now also be nouned.
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I'll grant you that. I guess I never had a need to present myself as a masked nobody and call it a profile. The main reason of using social networking services for me are my real-life contacts.
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You can turn on/off whether you appear in searches in the privacy settings.
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I have 2 commonly used email accounts. One of them has my name abbreviated in the email address, and has my full name and gender listed. The other takes my handle for the address, and has random data for everything else. They won't be making anything public that wasn't already.
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Doesn't that imply everybody who currently has a Google Profile will be moved to Google+ by the end of the month? That's... pretty quick moving, if true.
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Are they on Facebook payroll or what? (Score:2, Informative)
Has anyone read TFA or the original page that it refers to as 'list of known privacy bugs'? There isn't a single privacy bug mentioned there.
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What scares me: (Score:2)
Google Circles could be the one thing which actually really works in the good way and bad way much beyond what facebook could ever do. Its scary. Combine it with your places profile, circle of friends and google searches..... Dont forget who makes android. Ich all applications on the mobile phones have integration with circles then facebook and some other may have trouble.
What Google+ Needs to Win (Score:5, Insightful)
Not Big Issues (Score:5, Insightful)
Reading through the list of known issues, and none of them are really show-stoppers, just bad housekeeping. Stuff like, when you block someone, their existing posts stick around. That's actually expected behavior in some systems. I might block you for being crazy today, but still want to go back and read what you posted three years ago when you were sane.
Of course the biggest privacy issue of all is missing:
When using Google+, one company has unfettered access to your searches, page views, ad clicks, social graph, email, calendar, chats, documents, photos, location, and interests.
Apple and Microsoft have (theoretically) had access to all of this via your desktop OS for years, and so has the NSA (via AT&T) so maybe it's no big deal. Still, Google, like Facebook, is an advertising company. You are not the customer -- you are the product.
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You are not the customer -- you are the product.
Nah, we're only resources, and will become products only after Google starts to make us to be more monetizable, change us to be easier to sell. To do that, Google would have to change the way we read e-mail, search and browse the web, share videos and photos... Ok, fine, we're products.
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Apple and Microsoft have (theoretically) had access to all of this via your desktop OS for years, and so has the NSA (via AT&T) so maybe it's no big deal. Still, Google, like Facebook, is an advertising company. You are not the customer -- you are the product
I never really understood this fear. My personal data in the hands of a reputable company really doesn't scare me. Google serving up targeted ads that I might actually like seems like a feature, not a bug. The only really 'scary' thing about personal data is when criminals get it, corporations of ill repute get it, employers get it, and when a malicious government gets it.
Criminals having this data is bad for obvious reasons. With that much data, nailing down my financial accounts and preventing a phish
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Of course the biggest privacy issue of all is missing:
When using Google+, one company has unfettered access to your searches, page views, ad clicks, social graph, email, calendar, chats, documents, photos, location, and interests.
That's the Faustian bargain you already signed up for when you created a Google account. However, I'd still trust them more than say Facebook for the following reasons:
1) You can quit any time you want and export all your data (though Facebook also permits this).
2) You can block the privacy invading features with the appropriate browser extensions and hacks (face it, given that you're on Slashdot and talking about privacy, you won't find any problem rooting your Android phone and putting Droidwall on it, or
NEWS FLASH: UNFINISHED PRODUCT UNFINISHED! (Score:2)
Duh.
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You are right, nobody should be talking about this. What a waste of a good story. Lucky we have some sarcastic dick to entertain us with his opinion such as you, to actually make this readable.
Not everything is a criticism, and you sound like somebody defending Google.
Google+ Privacy Question (Score:2)
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Bueller??....Bueller???
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You can simply review their Privacy Policy [google.com], which is dang respectable IMO.
G-mail and Google Voice aren't really linked, but both display your contacts. I believe they also added the ability to place a call from the gmail interface?
Anyways, I've seen no correlation of those services to YouTube at all.
This page [google.com] allows you to control whether Google profile info is used to customize ads or not (accessible without Google+).
If you are paranoid about searches, simply disable cookies (or use Firefox's Private Brow
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Anyways, thanks for the info.!
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Editorialize much?
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Will anyone ever create a social network firmly rooted in personal privacy? Are the two mutually exclusive?
How in the hell would a social network work when you keep everything private? That's called a diary. They sell those at Ideal Stationary for $15 if you want a fancy one.
MUST be open source - and here's why (Score:2)
Will anyone ever create a social network firmly rooted in personal privacy? Are the two mutually exclusive?
Yes, and no. But there are other forces at work. In fact, there are a number of such projects ongoing already, and have been for years (because they can't commit the resources for a Google-style development pace, but that's another matter).
The most important point is this:
For Facebook, and just as well for Google, the users are not the customers. The users are the product.
As long as this remains the case, you can pretty much forget everything about personal privacy -- they need access to your information in
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... as per tradition.
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Google doesn't ever sell your personal information to any third party companies like Facebook and other services.
Umm, you might want to actually re-read their privacy policy:
We will not collect, sell, or share personally identifying information from ad serving cookies without your explicit consent.
So, yes, they actually will sell your information with your consent. Facebook requires consent as well and you give them consent by agreeing to their TOS.
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And the ability to delete and edit content. Of course, that relies on assuming that they're being truthful in actually deleting/overwriting the content you posted, which they may have some obligation to do if they say that it is going to be deleted permanently.
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If it's privacy focused, why is it that people don't get the ability to approve who adds them to their circle? There have been a number of people on G+ complaining about this already.
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It is my understanding that by default if someone adds you to their circle, they are merely subscribing to whatever you post as "public", i.e. for the entire internet. If you don't add them back to a circle of your own and keep posting only to a restricted circle (say "friends") then they don't get to see your posts.
If for some reason you feel obliged to add them back to your circle (maybe to not offend them or whatever), you can always make a circle called "random people" and never include that circle in a
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if you are arguing that privacy and social network are mutually exclusive you could be right but if you are accusing google of some nefarious goals using those quotes then you are very wrong.
What they said is brutal but true. They may or may not care about your browsing habits or posts on social network, but there is a non-zero chance that the federales will show up at their doors one day with a judge/patriot act stamped warrant and they will be required by law to comply which equals to handing over some/al
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You mean, the software where as long as you were logged on, you could do anything, since they had no authorization checks?
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I know of one such case.
Suppose you're sharing something with a circle and allowing the recipients to comment on it. Those people will likely want to know who will see their comments, so they can know what's appropriate. However, them knowing that requires exposing who you shared with. So, it's a hard decision: either you have to expose some information about sharing, or you have to force people to comment without knowing who their audience is.
I think that trying to give users the ability to create informat
Google+ ToS (Score:2)
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Has anyone reviewed the Google+ Terms of Service? I'm wondering if they can just change this them on a whim. Something tells me that if Google+ were truly successful, then at some point in the future they would change the ToS to incorporate reductions in privacy. However, if the ToS were a two-way, I don't know, 'contract', where users actually have contractual rights to their information, then perhaps that would be something more interesting to those who are concerned about privacy.
Excerpt from Google Terms of Service [google.com]:
9.4 Other than the limited license set forth in Section 11, Google acknowledges and agrees that it obtains no right, title or interest from you (or your licensors) under these Terms in or to any Content that you submit, post, transmit or display on, or through, the Services, including any intellectual property rights which subsist in that Content (whether those rights happen to be registered or not, and wherever in the world those rights may exist). Unless you have agree
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Well, he got a response, so who's the creepy loser now?
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It's been bought by Google and rebranded +Coin.