I am mostly for the ostensible cleaning up of YouTube comments, but what got me was that any time you share a YouTube video on Google+ proper or comment in a thread where someone shared a YouTube video, it automatically cross-posts what you said back to the comments underneath the video on YouTube. And that's not just for shares/comments going forward: it's everything you've ever shared publicly, ever. I'm now gettin…
Ugh. This was my problem with Google+ too. Everything you do ripples out into the rest of the internet in a creepy way. When I was freelancing, I emailed back and forth with potential clients through the Gmail interface. One day I saw this party pic of a 20-something girl with beer in hand, identified by the full name of a receptionist I had emailed with professionally but never actually met. It was a suggestion from…
I think Facebook's recommendation system was using the data from other users' address books. As in I'd get a list of various people that I'd done business with in the past as suggested friends on Facebook. Those people had my address in their address book and I can only assume they'd uploaded their contacts to Facebook. Facebook retains that data. Here I am a new user. Wow how does it know I know such and such? I can only assume that it also works the other way: I join and I pop up in their account.
Google got into a mess with Buzz and the address book leaks, and email address leaks.
So there's a fine line here between privacy and helpfulness.