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Google Update? Not a Good Idea for Privacy, Users Say

The last Google Reader update failed to hit the spot

By Vlad Constandes, SEO News Editor

27th of December 2007, 20:41 GMT

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December 14th brought a change in the traditional Google Reader routine that I had entered a couple of months ago, that of opening it and, automatically, in a robotic-fashion starting clicking on the feeds I had received. That day brought sharing as a part of that experience, the option to show my friends the things I deemed worthy of their attention.

While I myself have a limited group of friends on

the Gmail account that I use the Reader on and they are the people that I truly care about, this feature upset the wide community of Google Reader users that have a very active social email life, if I may call it that. The old bad habit that the Contact Manager from Gmail had came into the spotlight once again and had any random user showing every person he had ever sent an email what he thought was funny or interesting, and that his friends should know about.

A user that identified himself with the online persona Modulo Noh wrote in a Google Group that "this is the worst 'feature' you have ever introduced" and many more followed in the same lines. Three days later, a Google employee tried to calm things down and assured the complainers that the Mountain View based company was listening to their problems and just after that Google closed for the winter holidays.

Lauren Weinstein, the founder of the Privacy Forum, where this problem was discussed, told RedlandsDailyFacts.com that the new feature posed no real major privacy concerns, but that Google had clearly mishandled its rollout. Nevertheless, according to a Google spokesman's email to a Mercury News reporter, Google has always told users of Google Reader that "'shared' items were public, though before the service was tweaked, people generally had to take a step to view their friends' list of shared items."

It looks like there's an easy way out: Google only has to adjust the feature to give its users more control over who can see the items that they have marked for sharing. However, the users should also "wise up a bit", as Robert Scoble, the VP of media development at PodTech.net, said.

TAGS:

google | reader | friends | update

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