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December 26, 2007
Google Reader Shares Stuff Its Users Shared, Outrage Ensues
A journal entry on Slashdot details how Google Reader's newish 'share' feature actually shares stuff:
"It all started on Friday, December 14. Towards the end of the day Google announced a new feature of their feed reader product: They were going to show all your 'shared' items to all your Gmail contacts, starting now. No need to opt-in, no way to opt-out. If you didn't react fast all the info you previously shared with your chosen parties could be viewable by everyone you had exchanged e-mails (using Gmail data)."
I remember noticing that my Google Reader account had a new bit of flair:
... and I clicked the "Manage friends" link right away to see who, exactly, my "friends" were. The only person I saw listed was my wife, for reasons I'm still not clear on, but it seems that my actual "friends" in the Googleverse are everybody in my address book, including people there solely because I received mail from them I've chatted with over Google Talk.
The personal impact of this whole thing was blunted a little by the fact that I'd been using shared items in Reader to act as a linklog in the sidebar of my personal blog. I'd "shared" nothing I didn't mean to be seen in public. Others, evidently, were "sharing" stuff because the URL Google gave the shared items feed was obfuscated enough to protect their privacy.
Several thoughts spring immediately to mind:
I didn't think much of the obfuscated URL as a security measure. Having no idea how it was generated, I had no idea whether it could be easily divined. That wouldn't have been enough security for me if I'd gone into use of shared items expecting them to be genuinely private.
The "shared" nomenclature should have been enough of a warning, anyhow.
People are still right to be peeved, because Google of all companies should have a sense that its users don't always pay attention to the nomenclature of an option or feature ... they look at what it does. So changing the behavior of the feature without much notice or an easy way to re-catalog large bodies of shared stuff was crummy.
Self-hosted is best with anything like this exactly because of cases like this. There are plenty of ways to share links with a select group of people vs. everybody in the whole wide world that don't depend on the whims of a third party.
I wish Google would drop any ambitions it has to use social networking as the axis upon which its services rotate. I don't want it to use my address book to figure out who my "friends" are, I don't want it to create public profile pages, and I don't want it to create the same sort of creepy, cloying "everyone's up in my business" sociability of Facebook or similar. That's what Facebook is there for, and I cleansed my account there of any meaningful information because I personally don't even want Facebook to handle social networking for me.
Google's clean, spare aesthetic rubbed off on me at some point. I like using its services because they don't imply any larger framework I'll have to contend with. It's enough for me that the information I entrust to Google is related and combined for my personal consumption, not anybody else's.
Hopefully the company's off its responsiveness game because of the holidays, and we'll see a more useful response than what's been forthcoming so far once everybody's back to business next week.
Posted by mhall at 3:39 PM | Add Comment
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