All private Google Profiles will be deleted after July 31, 2011 | Hacker News Reader

All private Google Profiles will be deleted after July 31, 2011

google.com

74 pointsern44 comments

Google seems to be going about creating social products in entirely the wrong way. They seem to prefer forcing people on to their platforms (see Buzz in Gmail) rather than making a product that people actually want to use and spend time on.

Or integrate it incrementally one step at a time without any disturbance to those who don't use it.

I never really understood googles approach to these things.

Look at Wave. Why did I need a specific wave mail, why couldn't they just integrate with my gmail and again those who can use it great, those who can't no biggie.

So much engineering power yet so little design skills.

I think they're trying to go for that "difficult to stomach wisdom" thing that annoys us all so much.

I previously never had any desire to create a profile, I didn't see any reason to. But now I kind of want to create a private profile just to experience having my digital persona permanently deleted from record and to join the revolution. Orwell would be proud.

I don't know about permanently deleted. I'm sure some trace of it will remain somewhere!

Can anybody who has a private Google profile describe what they use it for and why?

I was pressured/forced at various times to create one in order to use Google services. I can't remember the details, but I do remember feeling annoyed at Google that it wasn't 100% clear how to opt out or hide things to the maximum amount, made worse by the fact that this un-asked-for task was between me and trying to achieve my original intent.

Since I didn't actually want one, a private one, which was effectively empty, was the next best thing.

My experience as well. Google strong-arms heavy users into its various social projects.

I created one, while I was trying out Buzz. I don't like putting my personal details out on the web for no reason, so I kept details out of my profile, and it stayed private.

When I saw this message yesterday, I saved the few "Buzzes" I made last year, and deleted my profile.

It should be the reverse, private should be the default, and public should be the eyebrow raising exception.

How nice it is of Google to decide by fiat to impose their standard on everybody else without consultatin (I know Eric Schmidt is on record as saying that he doesn't believe in privacy, here we have a prime example).

However, at least they are handling this better than the way Facebook does. If this was Facebook they would have (a) just done it without giving advance warning and (b) would have flipped everyone who was private over to public.

At least Google is deleting the accounts rather than outright exposing the info.

At least Google is deleting the accounts rather than outright exposing the info.

As far as I can tell, they are deleting profiles, not accounts.

"Deleting your public profile won't delete your Google Account." http://www.google.com/support/profiles/bin/answer.py?hl=en&#...

I think the argument here is: if you are going to have a private profile, you may as well simply not have a profile. Like, why did you spend the time to fill in a bunch of details into Google Profile just to mark it "private"?

Perhaps so you could share it explicitly with people you've vetted and trust with your information?

But there is no mechanism to share it explicitly with people you vetted. This isn't Facebook, there aren't friends with various levels of permission and a public version.

You could do that by just showing your screen to your vetted people, though, I suppose.

(a) There are friends with various levels of permission. Certain fields on the profile can be set to be visible only to certain groups of contacts.

(b) Upon noting (a), I filled out a private profile in anticipation that Google would be rolling out further mechanisms to share private profiles with certain contact groups.

World would be a very sad place if everybody were afraid to do anything publicly.

I'm curious too, though I think the whole point of this change is that a private Google profile is essentially useless.

I used it regularly to 'buzz' interesting articles for myself and for my daughter. Its a shame that I am forced to delete my private profile, and loose my ability to use 'buzz'.

We will have to strictly rely on news reader to share information between ourselves.

Not everyone wants or needs to be in social network where they do not control their own privacy.

Google should stop chasing facebook and focus on keeping their search relevant.

I don't really see where this post says private profiles are the same thing as private buzz posts.

I created one because when people google your name it will return as the very first result. This makes it quite useful to have all of the information that you want to be found available first instead of the random posts from 5 years ago that no matter how hard you try will always float near the top of the results.

I have a google account without a google public profile. I use it to access google reader and google wave (both are services used by my friends), as well as customizing google search behavior. I need to expose neither my real name nor my contacts information.

So you don't have a Google profile at all (neither private nor public). Nothing will change for you.

How can you tell if your profile is private? Just checked mine and don't see anything that distinguishes public from private.

1. Copy permalink to profile in clipboard.

2. Logout from your google account.

3. Going to google profile permalink, should not show your profile information.

4. Login to another google account.

5. Going to google profile permalink, should not show your profile information.

Or just open a private/anonymous session in another browser window :)

If you edit your profile, you'll see a field that says "Visible in Search." I think that's it, though I'm not sure.

That doesn't make your profile private, just not show up in Google searches.

When you put your information into the cloud terms and conditions apply, and they can be changed on a whim.

Just like the gold and silver bugs say, "if you don't hold it, you don't own it" ...

Ironically, a lot of the gold and silver bugs don't actually hold it.

I think that the following can be derived from the plan to delete private profiles:

- The upcoming Google social product will be launched in August 2011 or later.

- Public profiles are a key element of the new social product.

Google could ask users with private profiles to make them public, but people will scream about privacy. It's easier to remove the profiles from a PR perspective.

Looks like they learned their lesson from Google Buzz privacy fiasco. Instead of making them public by default they'll delete it.

I actually wonder what would happen to a google account without a public profile linked to a gmail address. IIRC deleting such account is impossible without deleting a corresponding gmail account. Loosing all your emails one day just because you are not into google buzz and other fancy social stuff would be horrible.

I'm wondering too. On https://www.google.com/accounts/ManageAccount , it says:

> You don't yet have a public profile. Learn more Create a profile or edit your personal info without creating a public profile.

I have no idea if I'm meant to create a public profile to save my email, or if I already have a private profile, or if I have no profile at all and this doesn't affect me. Hoping the last one.

As far as I can tell, deleting a profile has nothing to do with Gmail, or the rest of your Google account, besides Buzz. I deleted my profile, and still have access to the rest of my Google stuff, including Gmail.

You should be ok. It says that 'Deleting your profile won't delete your Google Account.' here: http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=...

As far as I can tell this statement is about a public profile. The private profile is essentially a google account, and I don't know a way to delete a google account and keep a gmail address associated with it.

No, the private profile is essentially a public profile. If you delete a public/private profile, all access to buzz is gone, and all past 'buzzes' will not be accessible (effectively deleted).

That's quite confusing. How can I tell that a profile is private vs public (which seems to be a default)?

That's funny, I'm always trying to create a Google profile but I can't, because my main account is on appdomains and they don't do profiles for appdomains. Which means I can't check into places on latitude from my android, for instance. You'd think they'd be a bit more worried about the potential user base they're shutting out of their platform, rather than worrying about deleting private profiles. Oh well.

Okay, this is too much. Forcing people to make their profiles public so that Google could do their next failing social experiment on the top of them?

Google does not delete the emails I deleted, that's how much storage they've got, why would they delete my profile? Obviously not a storage issue. I mean WTF google, seriosly. You are becoming as evil as any other bigco could be.

What do you mean? They see private profiles as pointless and made the business decision to not support this feature in the future.

They're not forcing anyone to have a public profile. You know what Facebook would have done? They would have simply made all private profiles public without any previous notification. That would have been evil. Instead, Google has chosen to follow a path where the default action doesn't compromise anyone's privacy and they have given ample time for people to decide whether they want to make their profile public or not.

From what I see, what they've done is pretty much the Right Thing To Do.

i dont understand, does this have any impact on gmail account?

I doubt it, I deleted my profile. My Buzz posts went as well, but my Gmail remains fine.

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