Privacy seems to be the new “hot topic” for Web 2.0 companies. There is a great opportunity in the market for a company like Google or Facebook to step up and just get privacy right, setting the benchmark for others. So why don’t they?
Google appears simply to lack the ability to anticipate how its actions will be perceived. Or in the case of the recent Wi-Fi scandal, actually has no knowledge of what it’s actions really are.
“Oops, we didn’t read the code! Copy/paste, copy/paste! Coding is fun!”
- Anonymous Google employee (possibly a robot)
And Facebook has the social monopoly. There’s nowhere else for users to go, so there’s no commercial incentive for change. All its users can do is complain. You’re not seriously suggesting that people could ever leave Facebook, right? Don’t be silly.
However, things could be looking up. Last night, when I logged into Google Reader, it asked me whether I wanted my Shared Items to be public or “protected”. I chose the latter, allowing me to share only with selected groups in my Gmail contacts. This can be configured under “Sharing Settings”.
Logging out of Google and visiting my old shared items URL confirms this indeed works.
Then for some reason, I had the fun time of typing in all my friends email addresses one at a time to follow each of them. Thanks Google UI designers.
