Shipping the Google in Google+ | Hacker News Reader

Shipping the Google in Google+

googleblog.blogspot.com

37 pointssahaj26 comments

I thought the advantage of having the +1 button in the browser is that you can then block all of those damn sharing widgets on websites so that these social networks don't know every website you visit because of the beacons.

But the +1 button extension will send every page you visit back to Google, with your unique user id as part of the information sent back.

This is just insane. There is absolutely no reason for this information to be sent back, and it is completely identifiable and all in plain text. The installer says that it can access all your website data, not that it does access it and sends it back to Google.

I removed the extension immediately.

> I thought the advantage of having the +1 button in the browser is that you can then block all of those damn sharing widgets on websites so that these social networks don't know every website you visit because of the beacons.

The advantage of of having the +1 button in the browser is so you can +1/share sites that don't include the +1 button themselves.

> But the +1 button extension will send every page you visit back to Google, with your unique user id as part of the information sent back

There is now way to know if you have +1'd a page without sending your unique id with. A button that doesn't tell you if you have +1'd something isn't very useful and you will continually be +1'ing pages over and over again.

> This is just insane. There is absolutely no reason for this information to be sent back, and it is completely identifiable and all in plain text. The installer says that it can access all your website data, not that it does access it and sends it back to Google.

If an extension has permissions to access "your data on all websites" there is no way to prevent it from also sending your data to all websites. HTTP is request and response and not very useful with only one or the other.

The Chrome Web Store says

"THIS ISN’T THE USUAL YADA YADA!

In addition to the practices described in the Google +1 Button Privacy Policy, by installing this extension, all of the pages and URLs you visit will be sent to Google in order to retrieve +1 information."

The install page linked to from the blog post should be more clear about what the +1 button sends to Google.

None of your data is sent in plain text however. It is all over SSL to https://clients6.google.com/rpc.

> I removed the extension immediately.

Good for you. No one is forcing you to use it.

> There is now way to know if you have +1'd a page without sending your unique id with.

localStorage or asking which URLs have been plus 1'd, not the other way around. There are plenty of ways of doing it without sending a request back to google on ever. single. page. load.

I found the disclosure about all website visiting being sent to Google only after looking for it and clicking through some pages. 95% of users will never find that since being alerted to it isn't part of the standard install flow.

I don't think you've ever designed a scalable webapp that requires synchronized user data to be available across browsers, platforms, sessions, etc.

It's a basic fundamental tradeoff decision that all app developers have to make - store client-side or server-side and if you want any kind of sanity for the user, it's usually better to store server-side.

> localStorage or asking which URLs have been plus 1'd, not the other way around. There are plenty of ways of doing it without sending a request back to google on ever. single. page. load.

This introduces all kinds of issues with complexity of having to support multiple storage locations, and inconsistency/sync lag caused +1'ing pages on multiple computers or buttons from the page rather then the extension. If I have two computers and +1 a few pages with one then switch to the other it would either have to download a list of all pages I +1'd. Which could get up into the thousands or tens of thousands or some sort of complex pagination, diff, merge feature. It just isn't worth it.

Chrome already does all that for bookmark syncing.

The list of +1'ed websites will never grow _very_ large, because it is created one manual click at a time by a single user. 10,000 urls is only about a megabyte, and if you send diffs you'd rarely have to download more than a small fraction of them.

Not that i disagree that this is a bad thing, but you are aware that nearly every single webpage includes Google Analytics tracking scripts that provide the same information to Google?

the installer says it can access all your website data, because extensions can, by definition, access the DOM. that's just the way extensions work.

> all of the pages and URLs you visit will be sent to Google in order to retrieve +1 information

This is a deal breaker. There's no reason that Google couldn't have used a hash of the URL.

To be fair, that quote lives in the following (verbatim) context:

  ***THIS ISN’T THE USUAL YADA YADA!***
  
  In addition to the practices described in the Google +1 Button Privacy
  Policy, by installing this extension, all of the pages and URLs you
  visit will be sent to Google in order to retrieve +1
  information. Examples of this information include whether you’ve
  previously +1’d the page and how many people have already +1’d the
  page. Google’s use of this information is described further in the
  following help center article
  (http://www.google.com/support/profiles/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1319578).

At least they're not trying to hide anything, recognize that some people will have privacy concerns, and are drawing attention to this fact. The linked FAQ claims that they don't store the information persistently. Though I suppose it could be argued that this policy is subject to change in the future.

Just wondering, do you also block AdSense and Google Analytics? If not, a large portion of URLs you visit are already reaching Google through those inserts.

Google does some normalization on urls before +1'ing them. For example urls shared through Feedburner have a bunch of GET parameters added on. If Google just hashed the URL they wouldn't be able to strip those and single pages would end up having multiple groups of +1's.

>There's no reason that Google couldn't have used a hash of the URL.

While I agree with you, I have to constantly remind myself of Google's core business and that everything they do, directly or indirectly, needs to feed that. Advertising is king.

Yeah. This is even worse than the Alexa plugin because at least with the Alexa plugin, the pinging might result in all the pages I visit entering the Internet Archive's queue.

the chrome integration plugins look pretty good, but i really don't understand the utility of the youtube integration. if they had built some g+ sharing into the youtube interface, i could see that. but instead it looks like they've essentially built a youtube radio into the g+ page. why?

FWIW, I think this is entirely the wrong direction to integrate. I've been loving the "auto-sync photos and videos" feature of the Android G+ app, as it elminates a tedious manual step and as a result I get to show off more videos of my cute toddler.

... or I could, if my family is on G+. And of course they're not: they're on facebook. So what I want is the ability to simply move the G+ videos over to my youtube account. But I can't.

And YouTube's lack of a mobile site for publishing makes it excruciatingly painful to share a video uploaded from a phonecam. (As does YouTube's lack of privately-shared "albums" like Picasa has.)

Not so bad, really. On Android phones at least you select "share" while viewing the video and pick "youtube" from the list. But you still have to wait for the upload, it's not "just there" the way it is with g+.

Two purposes:

1. Discovery - the YT integration becomes your own radio while you're on G+. 2. Sharing - brings the ability to share the YT videos you're listening to currently easily on G+.

In one swift motion, it nullifies the need for other radio sites like rdio, Spotify, <INSERT_NEW_COOL_INTERNET_RADIO_STARTUP_HERE>

I was super excited when Google+ came out. I am a total Google fanboy. At least, I was a week ago. Then I found they didn't support their paying customers (apps users). So I waited and waited.

Finally supported a week ago! I'm PUMPED about trying google+. Except there's not a lot going on there and there is no api to integrate it with other social networks. It doesn't really have a purpose.

Then Google completely destroys Google Reader. My absolute favorite website can no longer create an RSS feed for other RSS users making it impossible for users to contribute content to Google reader.

Now I'm just pissed. Gmail is still the best mail service and I like my android phone, but Google has made so many terrible decisions lately - especially around Google plus - I don't care anymore. I'm done. If google decides to right its wrongs I will care about its services again.

If I were google I would drop everything and do the following as quickly as possible: 1.) Release an API for Google+ 2.) integrate google reader with google+. No, I'm not talking about adding a share button. I'm talking about full integration so that Google+ can feed data back into reader.

I doubt that they will be able to accomplish this fast enough to keep Google reader from dying. I'm sure some other service (like Hivemined) will fill the void, but they really need to get moving on that API if they want to save google+.

1. There is already a Google+ API. http://lmgtfy.com/?q=google%20plus%20api

2. It's always funny to hear these 'was-fanboy-turned-hater' stories because they suggest passion and then some kind of spurned ex-gf syndrome. If you don't like Google products anymore, don't use them. Move on brother.

Hopefully the G+ chrome plugin will stay as a plugin. I'm not too keen on it being integrated into it as a product as a whole.

Well, it is open source, so we can always yank it out if they try to push it on to us.

Is a popup really the best way to get YouTube into Google+?

That's not a smart integration in my view. Out of nowhere you place a youtube icon on a random location on the screen. And the pop up that follows that. You're basically switching the user's context when in fact your goal is to let her stick. There is something wrong going on with the UI design folks at google it seems.

Try letting people hangout with popular folks (from tech, media, science and other fields). Announce those hangouts. Let there be participants and viewers. Sell hangout guys!

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