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Tell HN: new evil invasive service: Google Authorship
There is a new invasive service called "Google Authorship." I have seen it take photos from Google+ marked as friends only, combine them with crawled data and then put together a publicly shared dossier that claims the person in question has started a Google Authorship account when they have not. There seem to be some controls you can try to get at after Google tells your friends you started an authorship account, but by then it is too late. It is something that tells other people you started an account (so you think that would be opt-in) and it is not even really opt-out (despite claims, at best you can change annotations, but you can't seem to actually opt-out).
- jmount 14y agoStill can't tell if the email that informed us was actually from Google or a phishing attack. The service does exist (was able to find it independent of the email) and is making false claims.
- tokenadult 14y agoIt sounds like you need to do more investigation of what you are reporting here. It's not easy to tell if you are observing genuine Google behavior that you dislike, or spoofed Google behavior that neither you nor Google would like. I have just signed up for Google Authorship, after being advised by other people who write all over the Internet and who get plagiarized often that signing up is a good idea. I have a Google+ profile, which is the usual way to implement signing up for Google Authorship.
- jmount 14y agoI didn't click on the email (risky). I did find Google search results labeled with Google authorship that I had not signed up for. So that is pretty much enough investigation. The "sign people up without telling them scam" is an old one (just saddened Google is stooping to it) and Google isn't an open source project that needs my donated time in building a bug report for them to ignore.