Apologies to those of you following me on Google+: this post is a rehash of conversations I had this weekend on the service.
The original conception of the Facebook “Wall” was based on the whiteboard college students hang on their dorm room door. Students who lived in your dorm could walk down the hallway and jot messages for the room residents on those whiteboards. (“Ultimate frisbee on the quad at 4pm today” or “Dinner tonight?”) Any student who walked down the hallway could see those messages. When you’re 22 and your most significant life experience is college, your dorm room hallway is your main community of neighbors and friends. As an adult who has graduated from a few schools and had a few jobs, you’ve got multiple hallways. That’s the problem Google+ Circles attempts to address: letting users define their “hallways.”
Now, a student would write something much differently on her best friend’s dorm door whiteboard than she would on a flyer she plastered on every public corkboard on campus. The way we talk and what we share differs based on who we think can see and hear those things. From what I can see so far, Google’s doing its best to recreate that sense of who-can-see-what-here in Google+.
On Google+, you can choose to publish a post that only certain individuals or groups can see. By default, every post on G+ has a “Share” link, which means anyone who sees it can re-publish that post to people or circles they choose. (You can pull down a menu and choose “Disable reshare” if you want, but assume most users don’t change the default.) So, by default, I could share something with two friends on Google+, then one of them could turn around and re-share that post to the public. Of course this could and does happen in real life, and when it does with sensitive information, it really stinks. Often, it’s less about malice and more about cluelessness; the friend you shared with didn’t realize you didn’t want him or her to broadcast it publicly.
This weekend Google announced that they were going to disable public re-sharing on limited posts to prevent people from violating that social contract. That is, if I wanted to make a post public, I would have done it myself. If I didn’t, then YOU shouldn’t be able to. Moreover, my sharing a post with a limited number of people is a social signal that I don’t want anyone to share something publicly.
Update: it appears the change is in place. I was not able to share a limited post publicly. When you click on the “Share” link on a limited post you get a reminder to “be thoughtful” about who you re-share with.
Unsurprisingly, my TWiG co-host and supporter of defaulting to public, Jeff Jarvis, disagreed with this decision. His argument is that the moment you share anything with anyone, you should assume it’s public, and that Google’s change gives users a false sense of safety. Jeff wrote:
If I read on G+ that you skipped work today and I share that, who’s to blame, me or Google? Well, you say, that’s why Google enabled sharing to be disabled. But I can turn around and tweet that information or blog it or email it to your boss or—shocker—not use technology at all but tell the boss when I see her on the street.
The problem is that Google+ is now giving the false comfort that sharing can be disabled. It can’t be.
Oh, yes, I think it’s a good thing to put conditions and caveats: when I tell people something confidential, I make sure to label that. I try to tell only people I trust with that confidence. But I also know that it is out of my control once I’ve said it. Isn’t that why we are all careful not to see terribly sensitive things in email? And if we do and if that secret gets forwarded, should do/do we blame the technology or the person?
It’s true: if you have secrets to share and can’t trust the people you’re sharing with, there’s little technology that can help you. Even if that Share link isn’t there, every restricted post is only a screenshot, copy-and-paste, or offhand comment on a podcast away from being public.
That all said, if you are in the business of creating a superior social network, you want to recreate a sense of private, semi-public, and public spaces. If I’m having a private conversation with a friend over coffee in real life, he can’t go on television and replay a video of that conversation on-air. The ability to share a limited post to the public is the equivalent of that.
Google+ developer Trey Harris explains the app’s attempt at creating a real-to-life model:
Privacy online is a hope rather than a guarantee. All secrets I share, no matter what protections I put on them, can be shared further; otherwise they couldn’t have been shared in the first place. You can cut-and-paste, take a screenshot, paraphrase.
But the goal that circles and sharing controls try to address isn’t to limit the technical possibility to share. It’s to add online the social controls we take for granted in real life. I speak one way in front of a small group, trusting that they won’t repeat my coarse language in public. I tell my closest friends I had a scary lab result and am waiting for a biopsy; I tell them I’d like them to keep it to themselves for now.
This trust is implicitly assumed in real life, yet completely absent in most online social-site interactions. The flattening and equivalence of “friends” is one reason. Once a person from my gaming group is included in a message about my scary lab result which I’ve shared “only with friends”, her first thought is going to be, “why is he telling me this?” And her second thought will be, “I guess he doesn’t care who knows it.” And her third might be, “my friends should be reminded they should get tested, I’ll forward this on.” No malice, but my trust was violated.
The second reason follows the first: subtle hints, the fact that we pull someone aside before speaking, our hushed tone, our glances around us, our plaintive look, communicate that we don’t want what we’re imparting shared. In real life, we know we’re skating on thin ice when we have to say out loud, “keep this between you and me.” The in-band disclaimer shows that we aren’t sure of the level of trust, or that our listener might misunderstand how privately we hold the information shared. Online, we have none of the subtleties, the in-band disclaimer is our only option, but with the ease of copying, “do not forward” warnings can come across as ludicrous and crass at best.
Technology cannot enforce secrecy and privacy. Still, I say things in email and chat and Twitter direct messages to my closest associates I’d never say on this blog, because the tools allow me to do that, but most importantly, because I trust those people. No Twitter client lets you retweet direct messages, and my personal and professional life is better because of that decision. Good on Google for helping users keep non-public posts just that.
15 Comments
Avi Burstein
All well and good in theory, but if someone does share something with me online, how would I know that I am part of that select “keep it private” group, or part of the larger group that sharing it with indicates she doesn’t mind that it gets passed on?
rrrrrichard
Jeff is wrong because people inadvertently make social gaffes all the time. If Google does something to minimize the frequency and severity of your friends blabbing something you’d prefer not be blabbed — great. If you made a mistake by telling your friends in the first place, so what? It’s still correct to minimize the harm of these mistakes regardless of how blame for them might be ascribed. Why should Google make yet another mistake by facilitating additional blabbing when it need not do so?
Gina Trapani
You can see who the post was shared with, and that it is not public.
profiles.google.com/drwhitney
Half the time, I don’t limit my sharing because the information is private, but because I want to keep my information relevant to my followers. (Thanks, Jeff, for articulating this on TWiG). Pre-Google+, I used Twitter vs. Facebook to split my social circles, but now Google+ makes this easy. For this reason, I like Google’s current implementation where they make sure you are aware that it was first shared with a limited group, but I don’t want to see Google disable sharing for limited posts by default.
brendan_charles
It’s sad that Google’s approach to this privacy is a lot like the way Facebook approaches these same issues. Basically they soften the wording, apologize but don’t change or update the feature to be more private. It’s a pattern of a lack of respect of users and in Google’s case, shows that Google+ is nothing more than a user grab.
Steve Manke
I’m going to side with Google on this one. The service isn’t trying to make the post bullet proof private. Its just trying to give the person posting the message a sense of limited privacy.
This is how I expected the sharing to work. It seems 100% logical in my mind. That fact that it didn’t work this way initially troubles me because I just assumed as much and never considered otherwise. Not that I would post something online that is that unfit for public consumption but that’s really not the point here. Its a question of what people assume their inherent privacy is without having to read up on the services policy for each aspect of its features.
Robert Bigelow
While I am impressed with Google+, I still apply the same rule I’ve been Inter-networking by since I was posting messages and comments on the dial-in Bulletin Board Systems: assume EVERYTHING is public.
Brad
What Jeff is saying is that everyone is too stupid to use technology properly so lets make it simpler, and tell everyone that everything they say is public. No one wants that. Look how upset people have been about privacy with Facebook! I think there’s a middle ground between providing privacy options and just making everything 100% public. Your point about how face-to-face communication happens illustrates that the best. However, I’d support an part of the initial sign-up that says “Hey! The Internet is public! If you say it here, someone can take it and say it over there.” Just a reminder that there are no real secrets in life except the ones that go untold.
Joseph
Maybe I’m old fashioned, but a phone call is still the best way to communicate with people if you can’t see them in person. In the way that Google Plus has initially structured, I feel like posting to a circle is like a conference phone call without the immediacy. That is what has been missing from what I know of all the “social” services. I also trust that the person I am speaking with is not recording the phone call so they could play it for someone else. This is why I feel the permission to reshare a “limited” post should not be granted by default. The only other way I could think of doing this is having the reshare permission assigned to the individual circles you create. Some of your circles could be phone calls, some could be megaphone announcements to a crowd. Both ways have benefits and I know I would like both.
Lola Beno
To Joseph, I respond with the fact that when the phone was invented, the networks were open to the public in that everyone who had a phone in the neighborhood could listen in on the conversation. Of course, now the phone technology has evolved so that the default is to private conversation unless you explicitly open up the speaker phone, or there is wiretapping operation going on.
nathanmabry.com/
Jeff is wrong. If I share something, I shouldn’t assume it’s public, but I should be aware that it could intentionally become public.
Let’s consider that I take some pictures of my kids and post them to my “Family” Google+ Circle. Grandma sees one and wants to share it with her “Bridge Club” circle. This would probably be fine, but maybe Grandma is not as savvy using the tools (we aren’t all technically adept) and shares it as public (assuming Google permitted that). Now, there are pictures of my kids (minors) for the world to see which are potentially tagged with their name and the location those pictures were taken. Let’s hope that creeps aren’t trolling Google+ public photos, and let’s hope that I’ve instilled wisdom in my kids when facing strangers.
I love Google’s “be thoughtful” reminder. If you are so intent on sharing something, you can copy and re-post, but that takes intention, volition, and enough effort for you to truly consider if it is wise.
I truly appreciate the extremity of Jeff’s opinion (both quoted here and on TWiG). He definitely brings an awareness that many will miss.
Thanks.
Avi Burstein
Gina, I just heard you say on TWiG (44:45) that you can’t see what circle you’ve been placed in. Doesn’t that mean you can’t see who the post was shared with? I’d assume so, since showing who it was shared with would also show who’s in the same circle as you. No?
(I haven’t been let in to the beta yet, so apologies if this issue is clear to actual users.)
Joseph
Yes Lola. The phone technology did “evolve” to be private. That is my hope for this service. And as you point out, anyone, especially the government, can get around the privacy barriers built buy any communication service. Malicious intent can motivate people to do just about anything. But the beauty of a circle is that it is closed object. And I hope that Google intentionally used that symbol for that reason. They already know what we search for, who we email, and for some people who we stay in touch with by phone. I don’t know if the information that Facebook so desperately wants and keeps for their own is the goal for Google to obtain. They want us using the internet. And I know for myself that if circles truly stay closed, I will be using it much more than I ever have. I will have the choice to be private and trust people, as I do without a computer in front of me.
Josef Ferguson
Google could probably fix this “problem” if they added an ‘allow re-sharing’ check-box, but I don’t know if that’s the right solution. It could reduce content over-all since most people would probably default to ‘no’ in that situation and just leave it set that way, even for stuff that they intend to share publicly.
Google+’s circles are not a perfect solution to the problem of privacy, but they are certainly a step in the right direction.
Josef Ferguson
(By the way, that was an intentional and correct use of “ironic quotes” in the first sentence of my previous post, since I’m not entirely convinced that this is a problem at all. Which is to say I tend to agree with Jeff. Once I put something online, I assume anyone and everyone is going to have access to it.)