While “the stream” in Google+ gets tweaked for better privacy control, Google Profiles are now required to be public. From the help document:
We believe that using Google Profiles to help people find and connect with you online is how the product is best used. Private profiles don’t allow this, so we have decided to require all profiles to be public.
Keep in mind that your full name and gender are the only required information that will be displayed on your profile; you’ll be able to edit or remove any other information that you don’t want to share.
If you currently have a private profile but you do not wish to make your profile public, you can delete your profile. Or, you can simply do nothing. All private profiles will be deleted after July 31, 2011.
On requiring that users enter either Male, Female, or Other into the “Gender” field in Google Profiles (argh, gender is not sex), Danny O’Brien writes:
A strange omission in an otherwise very sensitively put together service: I’m a bit (honestly, very) weirded out by the fact that G+ requires you to provide a gender, and then makes it compulsorily world viewable (try editing who gets to see it in your profile).
That’s often a particularly sensitive bit of information; especially if you identify as “Other”. I mean, I can’t be the only one thinking that constructing a list of people who identify as Other in a local area isn’t something that we want to enable. Or women for that matter.
Speaking of gender identity, it appears that only 10% of G+ field testers identify as female. I’m trying to get a confirmation or denial from the Googlers-in-charge on that.
4 Comments
Robert Bigelow
Google+ could have avoided that can of worms by leaving gender or sex out of their public profiles, especially since most beta testers are friending and “hanging out” with others they know and trust IRL.
It’s dehumanizing to be categorized as a sex or gender before being regarded as a person.
MikeT
I realize that social networks /= online gaming, but I wonder if women testing social networks tend not to self-identify as women as a strategy for avoiding harassment.
Darius Dunlap
This seems a bit confused. Elsewhere in the help it says,
“Your profile is public on the Web. When people search for you, your profile will show, at a minimum, your name and photo.”
( http://www.google.com/support/profiles/bin/static.py?page=guide.cs&guide=1355574&answer=1047277 )
No mention of gender there. And this seems almost like a caricature of Google’s nerdly mistakes.
I can’t remember the quote, but something said by one of the Google guys you had on TWiG last week left me with the impression that they understood that some people really only wanted to be visible to people they allow.
I remember this because when he was talking I thought “wow, it’s like someone at IIW (Internet Identity Workshop) from Google really got it!”
I led a session there titled, “Pseudo Anonymity and Reputation Systems” where we explored the need for anonymity, pseudonyms and transportable reputation. Notes are here:
http://iiw.idcommons.net/Pseudo_Anonymity_and_Reputation_Systems
So after listening to TWiG, I was hopeful. Everything Gundotra and Horowitz said told me that they had really thought this through and that they “got it”.
But, as always, the devil is in the details. Maybe this is just an easily corrected mistake. Certainly the inconsistencies in the help document point to some kind of confusion. We’ll have to see.
Galia Bahat
Weird, I thought I sent a reply..
Anyway –
a. IMHO, choosing “other” doesn’t imply that the person doesn’t identify with the male or female gender. People who don’t want to share will choose “other” (that’s what I did, and I’m female in both sex and gender. I just don’t want to share that on my Google profile)
b. A mandatory, binary “gender” field IS helpful, though it could stay private.
I speak Hebrew, and one of the problems in building interfaces in Hebrew (and other languages) is that it’s gender-specific as opposed to English, which is gender-indifferent. At least I think these are the official terms. Verbs, adjectives and more contain gender information.
So if, for example, a website wants to say: “You are now logged in” in Hebrew, the words for “you” and “logged in” would be different for men and women. (and I don’t know of any solution for people who identify with neither gender)
The solution? Everyone uses the male form. That’s what the language’s rules say.
It’s obviously not satisfactory in a world thriving for feminism. But there’s no better solution.
..Unless the site requires you to fill in your gender, and then uses that to phrase dialogs.
I did that once in a CMS that I wrote, I wanted people to feel comfortable with it. I don’t know if it worked, though, the project died too early.