Tempest in an Echo Chamber
People are crucifying Google for sharing shared Reader items with your friends.
How absurd. The “share” feature has been there for a long time, and WTF do people expect to happen when they hit “share”? In fact, ever since the “share” feature has existed, that little “share” button has … gasp! … shared the item!
In fact, the default behavior of the “share” button is to SHARE WITH EVERYONE ON THE INTERNET. Yes, complete strangers! EVERYONE! So Google just made that share visible to people on the Orkut friends list, and everyone is in a frenzy? Give me a break.
If anything, this is a spam issue, not a privacy issue. If I were an Orkut user, I might get annoyed at seeing too many status updates from friends wo use Reader. But that’s it — they were already sharing their updates with the whole Internet, so privacy isn’t the issue.
December 28th, 2007 at 4:56 pm
At the end of the day, the users are right not the geeks. Bitching that users don’t get it is a quick way to have less users. Google have realized the error of their ways and have attempted to patch their error with a comprehensive fix on the way.
All’s well that ends well.
December 28th, 2007 at 11:56 pm
What does the patch do? Revert to “stalkers can see your items, but not your friends”? Sounds like a lovely resolution to me. Of course the users are right, but they need to have enough information to make an educated decision.
I’m reacting specifically to Danny Sullivan’s comments, where he says that Google should postpone the feature and “allow users to explicitly opt-in with the friends they want to see the items”. This is complete B.S.
If Google implements a feature which pretends to opt-in for friends, but doesn’t make it clear that it does NOT opt-out of stalkers, it’s misleading. The fact that many users are apparently uninformed and believe that they could opt-in for friends, yet have no idea that they CANNOT opt-out for stalkers, does not make it ethical. Relying on user ignorance may be a fine strategy to avoid recrimination in the echo chamber, but it’s not an ethical approach to business.
December 29th, 2007 at 9:32 am
Average Web users tend to think that security by obscurity is fine. I think the big disconnect is that geeks like you and the Google folks realize that it isn’t really security and don’t see any difference between that and broadcasting to your “friends”. Of course, this isn’t the case in practice.
There’s an interesting but separate question as to whether Google should have implemented the “share” feature using security by obscurity in the first place since it isn’t really secure. I’m sure you can guess my opinion there.