Remember the Google Buzz fiasco? In their eagerness to roll out their latest whizz-bang new killer feature (by the way, does anyone still use Buzz?), Google didn’t bother to think about - or deliberately chose to ignore - the potential privacy implications of their model and ended up exposing everyone’s contacts. A predictable outcry followed, and Google was forced to walk it all back and put in the protections that should have been in there from the start.
But that’s all in the past now, and Google have learned their lesson, haven’t they? Well, no. Because now they’ve launched Google Social Search, another exciting innovation we didn’t need that … leaks all your contact information all over again.
How does it do that? If you’re logged in when you search for something, Google will show results that are somehow related to your ‘social circle’. Google assembles your social circle by the usual connectivity voodoo - digging through your Gmail contacts, your Google reader subscriptions and so forth. So far, there’s no great cause for alarm. But Google also includes second-order contacts - friends of your friends - in the results. And that’s where the trouble starts.
To illustrate the problem, suppose you are a married man who has been secretly carrying on with the local femme fatale. Your wife does a search for that charming little restaurant where you celebrate your wedding anniversary, and uncovers a glowing review written by that shameless hussy, accompanied by a helpful note from Google explaining that she shows up in the results because she’s a friend of yours. Marital ructions ensue.
Or you’re considering leaving your job at WidgetCo and have been sending out copies of your resume. When your boss searches for something, his social search results suddenly include half a dozen recruiters and the CEO of rival GadgetCorp, all tagged as contacts of yours. Problematic, no?
The possible scenarios go on and on. Subscribe to a mailing list for wombat fetishists? One lucky search hit and the whole world can know about your fondness for those winsome marsupials. And so on. And so on.
Friend-of-a-friend (FOAF) leaks are one of those nasty social networking gotchas that most users don’t think about. Apparently Google didn’t think about this one either because - even after the Buzz mess - they went ahead and engineered it straight into their new baby. What they didn’t do, of course, is provide any way for you to opt-out. There’s no mechanism for saying “No, dammit, don’t expose my list of private contacts to all my friends.” And unlike Buzz, which at least you had to start using before it could out all your contacts, Google Social Search will go ahead and expose your friends without you lifting a finger. I guess they call that progress.
So here we go again. Once again, we need to make a noise and get Google to undo their latest piece of thoughtlessness before it starts messing up people’s lives.
I’d been seeing people’s google-reader-shared items in search, but this is a whole ‘nother level.
from worship the glitch
