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Google+ broke our trust

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Re: Google+ broke our trust

#131

Post by clsec »

thefreeman wrote: post #126
pron wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can understand not wanting the NSA to snoop your correspondence. I can't understand letting Google do that for years, analyze it, profile you and sell that information to just about anyone, but then thinking that the NSA is the final straw.

I can't really understand the effort of deleting everything either. I highly doubt Google ever really deletes anything. Once you've sent it to their servers, the cat is out of the bag.

I'm fully aware of that. I just tried, if at all possible, to minimize the damage I brought onto myself. And to also try and show my hoopers how serious the privacy issue is.

Re: Google+ broke our trust

#132

Post by bane »

IgorPartola wrote: post #29

I don't get it. So Brin announces to the world that Google+ is the new sliced bread in 2011. Then he tells a small group of people that he thinks he personally should not have been involved with G+. Also the leader of the G+ project leaves (one month after the project started? One month after Brin had his candid talk recently?) Where in this is the broken trust? What is the author actually upset about? Seems to me li…

The problem was the G+ was pitched as a social network. It grew, like a cancer, into some weird meta-project that defies description, and along the way fucked over lots of people who worked very hard to maintain different identities and roles in the various on-line milieus they frequented. Sometimes it was as simple as revealing their real name to their model plane group. Other times it involved just shutting down real income generating youtube channels that people had poured lots of time and effort into (thousands of hours), or revealing to abusive ex-spouses where you lived...all without any real good reason and zero upside to the users of the various Google properties and dubious upside to Google as a business.

This was very costly for Google just on the employment front as well. Word on the street is that Google had upwards of 1,200 employees working on the G+ project. Fully burdened, that's something like $250-300m/year.

There was no upside for the entire project, for users or for google. So now, a couple $billion later, they finally realized what everybody else on the planet realized 2 years ago. They could have just surveyed users back then to find out where they were screwing up, but in typical Google fashion, that would have involved actually engaging with their users, which Google is borderline allergic to.

Re: Google+ broke our trust

#133

Post by tomp »

pron wrote: post #57
clsec wrote: post #34

I jumped on board early when I received an invite. I despised FB and was looking for for something that might actually resemble the tribe.net model of freedom and anonymity. Unfortunately, I was told that I had to use my real name and signed up accordingly. Everything was going along fine for about the first 9 months until I got into a small flame war with a woman in Canada about Scientologists (I used to work for so…

I can understand not wanting the NSA to snoop your correspondence. I can't understand letting Google do that for years, analyze it, profile you and sell that information to just about anyone, but then thinking that the NSA is the final straw.

Google can't put you to jail. NSA (and the government) can.

Re: Google+ broke our trust

#134

Post by pron »

d23 wrote: post #124
pron wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, perhaps more dangerous in theory. In practice, the biggest role the federal government has played in US history is that of liberating people from the tyranny of private businesses: first with slavery, then Teddy Roosevelt vs. the robber barons, the Civil Rights Acts (that prohibited private businesses from discriminating based on race), and most recently the (unfortunately not-so-successful) fight against priva…

Devil's advocate: they imprison a lot of their own citizens (more per capita than any other country) and play empire across the world.

Right. Still, I find it strange that almost all attacks on personal freedom in America have been done by private businesses (or in the name of private business), and almost all defenses against such attacks have been placed by the US federal government, and yet some Americans still trust private corporations -- that have hurt them again and again -- more than the government that has rescued them from the clutches of corporations time after time. If there is one country in the whole world that should definitely trust its government more than its corporations, that would be the US.

Re: Google+ broke our trust

#135

Post by nknighthb »

d23 wrote: post #124
pron wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, perhaps more dangerous in theory. In practice, the biggest role the federal government has played in US history is that of liberating people from the tyranny of private businesses: first with slavery, then Teddy Roosevelt vs. the robber barons, the Civil Rights Acts (that prohibited private businesses from discriminating based on race), and most recently the (unfortunately not-so-successful) fight against priva…

Devil's advocate: they imprison a lot of their own citizens (more per capita than any other country) and play empire across the world.

The obviously relevant US government (since it's the one that ended slavery, fought the robber barons, passed the Civil Rights Act, recently passed health insurance reform, and has limited powers compared to other western democracies) imprisons 216,896 people[0], or less than 0.07% of the US population.

State governments are not "the US government". If someone says "the US government", they are either referring to the federal government, or need to do a great deal more research before speaking about US governance.

[0] http://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/population_statistics.js...

Re: Google+ broke our trust

#136

Post by Silhouette »

bane wrote: post #129

> Google+ embodied the Internet's cardinal sin: It broke everything it touched I think this is the most important single line of the piece. G+ was pretty broken from the get go despite some promising ideas. But instead of focusing around what was working, Google simply amplified all the broken garbage -- then spread it around everywhere, making everything toxic, cancerous. It's one of those many weird cases where you…

I think there was a more thought-provoking part than the "broke everything it touched" line:

Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt told National Public Radio digital editor Andy Carvin in 2011 that if people don't want to use their real names, then they shouldn't use Google+. He explained that Google should be considered "an identity service" with Google+ as the foundation across all its products.

Google, particularly its senior executives, have been utterly unrepentant as they've systematically trashed their once hallowed "do no evil" philosophy. The thing I find disappointing is that more people didn't take Schmidt's advice and stop using Google's services.

There are plenty of alternative search engines, e-mail services, video hosting sites, mobile operating systems and browsers. Outside these five, Google have relatively few big success stories anyway. Their track record in recent years has mostly been one failure after another, even sometimes damaging their established brands like YouTube and Google Maps.

And yet despite all the complaining, a lot of users seem to stick by them. I can understand that behaviour with Facebook (and Google+ itself) because of the inherent network effect, but the longevity of Google's brand loyalty is remarkable.

Re: Google+ broke our trust

#137

Post by unclebucknasty »

spodek wrote: post #87

A suggestion for Google to save itself regarding G+: Donate some of its engineers' time to fix and revitalize Diaspora -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_%28social_network%29 -- or one of its peers or something along its original vision. It could achieve its goal of disrupting Facebook, give users their privacy back, and by releasing the source code, could role back its role in maintaining the code or policing…

>It could achieve its goal of disrupting Facebook

The Facebook (as a product) ship has sailed. Even Facebook knows this, which is why it's offering and paying billions to any products/services that can and/or have stolen its eyeballs.

Perhaps the worst mistake Google made in all of this was strategic: rather than trying to out-Facebook Facebook with a competing product (and nearly destroying their own ecosystem in the process), Google should have focused on using their considerable resources to snap up companies that were indirectly taking mindshare and audience from Facebook.

In so doing, they could have left Facebook's core product to Facebook and virtually surrounded it with other products/services for that inevitable time when people were ready for anything but Facebook.

In other words, they should have pre-empted Facebook's current strategy vs. it's prior one. As it is, Google is one step behind.

Re: Google+ broke our trust

#138

Post by jd75 »

wfjackson wrote: post #13

If there's one video that shows off the purposefully confusing Google+ and Youtube integration mess, its this one of a woman literally crying because of it. Warning: Strong language https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccxiwu4MaJs

I didn't link my ID's, then one day I clicked the wrong button and ended up using YouTube with my real, full name (gross!). I looked for my playlist containing all the private videos I'd uploaded of my small children and it was gone!

I found the playlist later under my other, weird shadow YouTube account, but in the moment when I thought all the videos of my son's first years were gone (I do have backups... somewhere), I can easily imagine crying my eyes out.

Re: Google+ broke our trust

#139

Post by tlogan »

bane wrote: post #129

> Google+ embodied the Internet's cardinal sin: It broke everything it touched I think this is the most important single line of the piece. G+ was pretty broken from the get go despite some promising ideas. But instead of focusing around what was working, Google simply amplified all the broken garbage -- then spread it around everywhere, making everything toxic, cancerous. It's one of those many weird cases where you…

> Red flags were raised and simply brushed aside.

People working at Google are smart (and majority that I know are smarter than me). Smart people are going to point that something is wrong. But they will not bitch too much because that will be "career-limiting move".

Re: Google+ broke our trust

#140

Post by justin66 »

VonGuard wrote: post #97
rando289 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hey, I can find videos of people angry at about anything that exists. Actually, you can't, and your post is a bit rediculous. For "features of websites that are widely used", how many of them are part of youtube crying videos? Probably ~0.0001% and it certainly could be useful to call one out.

See, this is why Google wanted real names on Youtube. We've all read Youtube comments. They are the single worst comments on the Internet. Typically racist, usually mean, often obscene. Google really, through all this, just wanted to make the comments better on YouTube, I think. They heard everyone bitching and figured this was a way to make things less caustic. It didn't help, though...

> See, this is why Google wanted real names on Youtube. We've all read Youtube comments. They are the single worst comments on the Internet.

Removing some anonymity probably removed some viciousness in turn.

Flip side: for some bizarre reason, now we see the comments of just about everyone who shares a video on Youtube and all their friends who comment. Small to medium amounts of viciousness have been replaced with an immense void of vacuousness.

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