Well, the old say­ing, “The third time’s the charm” may not appear to be true in Google’s lat­est attempt to enter the social media mar­ket.  Google is now test­ing out their spiffy new social net­work­ing plat­form called Google Plus (often referred to as Google+) in what they call a “lim­ited field trial,” but it looks as though they may end up embroiled in more con­tro­versy related to pri­vacy.  Let’s take a brief look at Google’s social his­tory, and then focus on Google’s lat­est social media experiment:

Google’s First Attempt

Google took its first step into social media with the launch of Orkut in Jan­u­ary of 2004, named for its cre­ator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkök­ten.  Within months, Google would be sued by the social-networking soft­ware com­pany Affin­ity Engines for allegedly steal­ing much of Orkut’s source code by a for­mer engi­neer.  Who was the engi­neer?  That would be Orkut Büyükkök­ten.  Google sued Affin­ity Engines one year later, alleg­ing Affin­ity Engines used source code cre­ated by Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten.

The ser­vice never really gained trac­tion in the United States, and finds the major­ity of its users resid­ing in Brazil and India.  The ser­vice is now hosted in Brazil.  Orkut had its share of issues over the years includ­ing pri­vacy con­cerns, racism, spam, and some pretty sig­nif­i­cant secu­rity flaws.  Orkut is still in oper­a­tion, though only 1.4% of its traf­fic orig­i­nates from the United States.

Google Gets Buzzed

Google took a sec­ond swipe at the social mar­ket in 2010 with the launch of Google Buzz, but the ser­vice was met with con­tro­versy from the very begin­ning.  The ser­vice was inte­grated into Gmail, and due to some unfor­tu­nate default pri­vacy set­tings, allowed per­sonal infor­ma­tion to be dis­closed with­out the con­sent of the user such as lists of Gmail con­tacts the user inter­acted with most.

It didn’t take long for Google to find itself embroiled in legal trou­ble.  A class action law­suit against Google was filed alleg­ing that Google Buzz vio­lated Fed­eral pri­vacy laws, with the set­tle­ment result­ing in Google set­ting up an US $8.5 mil­lion dol­lar fund to award groups that sup­port pri­vacy and edu­ca­tion online.  The Elec­tronic Pri­vacy Infor­ma­tion Cen­ter (EPIC) filed a com­plaint with the Fed­eral Trade Com­mis­sion against Google which resulted in an inves­ti­ga­tion which found Google guilty of vio­lat­ing its own pri­vacy poli­cies and falsely claim­ing to han­dle per­sonal infor­ma­tion orig­i­nat­ing from the Euro­pean Union cor­rectly.  On March 30, 2011, the FTC pub­lished the following:

FTC Charges Decep­tive Pri­vacy Prac­tices in Google’s Roll­out of Its Buzz Social Network

Google Agrees to Imple­ment Com­pre­hen­sive Pri­vacy Pro­gram to Pro­tect Con­sumer Data

Google Inc. has agreed to set­tle Fed­eral Trade Com­mis­sion charges that it used decep­tive tac­tics and vio­lated its own pri­vacy promises to con­sumers when it launched its social net­work, Google Buzz, in 2010. The agency alleges the prac­tices vio­late the FTC Act. The pro­posed set­tle­ment bars the com­pany from future pri­vacy mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tions, requires it to imple­ment a com­pre­hen­sive pri­vacy pro­gram, and calls for reg­u­lar, inde­pen­dent pri­vacy audits for the next 20 years. This is the first time an FTC set­tle­ment order has required a com­pany to imple­ment a com­pre­hen­sive pri­vacy pro­gram to pro­tect the pri­vacy of con­sumers’ infor­ma­tion. In addi­tion, this is the first time the FTC has alleged vio­la­tions of the sub­stan­tive pri­vacy require­ments of the U.S.-EU Safe Har­bor Frame­work, which pro­vides a method for U.S. com­pa­nies to trans­fer per­sonal data law­fully from the Euro­pean Union to the United States.

Read the full release at: http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2011/03/google.shtm

Sol­diers in the Field Test

Enter Google+, Google’s lat­est attempt to com­pete in the social media arena.  Google opened the ser­vice to a lim­ited num­ber of users in what was dubbed a “lim­ited field test” on June 28, 2011.  The ser­vice was heav­ily adver­tised as a pri­vacy friendly alter­na­tive to Face­book, cit­ing its Cir­cles fea­ture as a way to share con­tent only with the peo­ple you want but a grow­ing num­ber of users are voic­ing con­cerns related to pri­vacy, one of the biggest being the require­ment to use your real iden­tity on the service.

Google+ Cir­cles were designed to resem­ble cir­cles of friends in real life.  By post­ing work related con­tent to a work related cir­cle, fam­ily announce­ments and baby pic­tures to a fam­ily cir­cle, and videos of week­end par­ties to a social cir­cle, one could (in the­ory) keep the var­i­ous aspects of ones life sep­a­rate and avoid all man­ner of embar­rass­ing or employ­ment alter­ing sit­u­a­tions.  But crit­ics believe Cir­cles do not go far enough to pro­tect people’s pri­vacy or pre­vent acci­den­tal dis­clo­sure of sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion.  I tend to agree.

Pub­lic posts (posts not lim­ited to spe­cific cir­cles or indi­vid­u­als) are indexed by Google Search and can be found in reg­u­lar Google search results.  You can pre­vent your pro­file from being indexed by search engines, but not pub­lic posts.  One must keep this in mind if post­ing about sen­si­tive health issues, sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion, reli­gious pref­er­ences, polit­i­cal views, or activism.  Your real iden­tity (if you are com­ply­ing with Google’s cur­rent pol­icy) will be asso­ci­ated with your pub­lic posts.

One must also take great care when post­ing poten­tially sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion to cir­cles due to the abil­ity to share other people’s posts.  It is pos­si­ble to dis­able the abil­ity for oth­ers to share your posts, but it is an extra step uti­liz­ing a menu which must be accessed after the post is pub­lished, poten­tially allow­ing the post to be shared before the option to share it is dis­abled.  A post that has been shared before the option to share has been dis­abled will per­sist as a shared post.  A post that has been shared will per­sist as a shared post even if the orig­i­nal post has been deleted.  Once it’s out there, it stays out there, and can be re-shared over and over again.

A lesser known way by which peo­ple can unknow­ingly or acci­den­tally asso­ciate their real iden­tity with a par­tic­u­lar topic is through the use of the +1 but­ton.  The +1 but­ton is a fea­ture sim­i­lar in nature to Facebook’s “Like.”  You can indi­cate your approval of a post by sim­ply click­ing the +1 but­ton, which adds your name to a list of peo­ple who have also clicked the +1 but­ton.  This list is shown on the post, and if the post is pub­lic, it will be indexed and your name will now be a rel­e­vant search term for that post and its con­tent.  Think about that for a moment.

Of course, all of these pri­vacy con­cerns could be mit­i­gated by using a pseu­do­nym, but Google+ does not allow them.  Not unless the pseu­do­nym is the name which you are com­monly known by.  And if the point is to keep your con­tri­bu­tions online sep­a­rate from your real iden­tity, that does not help you one bit.

Google’s Iden­tity Crisis

If you’ve spent a bit of time on Google+ (or read the news), you may have noticed quite a con­tro­versy brew­ing over Google’s nam­ing pol­icy.  Peo­ple have been light­ing torches and sharp­en­ing pitch­forks over Google’s insis­tence that peo­ple use their real iden­ti­ties to par­tic­i­pate in the ser­vice, and I can’t say that I blame them at all.

Google’s cur­rent nam­ing pol­icy for Google+ states:

To help fight spam and pre­vent fake pro­files, use the name your friends, fam­ily or co-workers usu­ally call you. For exam­ple, if your full legal name is Charles Jones Jr. but you nor­mally use Chuck Jones or Junior Jones, either of those would be acceptable.

https://www.google.com/intl/en/+/policy/content.html

A Google Help arti­cle enti­tled “Your name and Google+ Pro­files” fur­ther states:

Google+ makes con­nect­ing with peo­ple on the web more like con­nect­ing with peo­ple in the real world. Because of this, it’s impor­tant to use your com­mon name so that the peo­ple you want to con­nect with can find you. Your com­mon name is the name your friends, fam­ily or co-workers usu­ally call you. For exam­ple, if your legal name is Charles Jones Jr. but you nor­mally use Chuck Jones or Junior Jones, any of these would be acceptable.

https://www.google.com/support/+/bin/answer.py?answer=1228271

While fight­ing spam is always a noble cause, Google’s nam­ing pol­icy will not pre­vent spam from mak­ing its way through Google+.  In fact, its already there.  Fake pro­files are going to hap­pen whether peo­ple use an obvi­ous pseu­do­nym like “Uncle Chuck­les” or a real sound­ing West­ern name like “Richard Weaver,” unless Google has plans to imple­ment some sort of manda­tory iden­tity ver­i­fi­ca­tion sys­tem.  I am not sure how well the plat­form will do with such an Orwellian approach to social profiles.

And what of vic­tims of rape or domes­tic abuse?  Why should some­one be forced to pub­licly iden­tify them­selves as “rape vic­tim” to reach out to other rape vic­tims for sup­port on Google+?  While one per­son may feel com­fort­able dis­cussing the sub­ject openly, iden­ti­fy­ing their real iden­tity as some­one who has been raped, oth­ers many not wish to con­tinue being iden­ti­fied in their day to day lives with their attack.  Addi­tion­ally, rape/domestic abuse sur­vivors may well wish to avoid leav­ing a trail of data online for their attack­ers to fol­low.  With each scrap of infor­ma­tion which is made avail­able online, the dis­tance between the vic­tim and the attacker shrinks.

Rape/domestic abuse sur­vivors are not the only peo­ple who may wish to keep their online activ­i­ties sep­a­rate from their offline lives.  Mem­bers of the LBGT com­mu­ni­ties, reli­giously diverse com­mu­ni­ties, polit­i­cal dis­si­dents are just a few exam­ples where such a sep­a­ra­tion can be essen­tial to per­sonal safety.

Pri­vacy con­cerns and per­sonal safety aside, the pol­icy fails to address people’s desire to express them­selves in their own way.  Our real names are not our real iden­tity.  The over­whelm­ing major­ity of us had our names cho­sen for us before we devel­oped a per­son­al­ity or had any­thing to con­tribute to soci­ety.  They do not rep­re­sent our thoughts, opin­ions, beliefs, or true nature.  They are merely a ref­er­ence point to the indi­vid­ual for use on tax forms and dri­vers licenses.  Many of us go by vari­ants of our real names, or dif­fer­ent names alto­gether (nick­names), when inter­act­ing with our friends and fam­ily.  We may even have numer­ous nick­names based on our numer­ous cir­cles of friends.  If Google+ was designed for “con­nect­ing with peo­ple on the web more like con­nect­ing with peo­ple in the real world,” don’t you think they would have taken this into account?

I do not believe the deci­sion to require real iden­ti­ties had any­thing to do with spam pre­ven­tion or com­mu­nity build­ing.  Google+ is not a social media plat­form.  It is a data mine, we are the min­ers, and the ore.