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I'm honestly not sure how your email address would be leaked, vanity URLs are name-based and at least one of the reasons Plus uses ID strings was in order to pr

I'm honestly not sure how your email address would be leaked, vanity URLs are name-based and at least one of the reasons Plus uses ID strings was in order to prevent leaking any account details through the URL. I'm sorry that other people are figuring it out, that sucks. If you remember what happened and think that G+ has had a hand in the leakage, please feel free to ping me (my URL is in my profile) and I'll try to follow it up. Personally I do feel that G+ has done a good job at communicating to users the privacy they do and don't have, as the ACLs were baked in at the beginning. I think users have had the possibility to be confused when data is being used outside the http://plus.google.com http://plus.google.com domain, like Shared Endorsements and the YouTube comments, as this opens up the worry ACLs are being violated. I think there's more work that can be done to communicate that this hasn't happened, such as putting the "Shared (publicly|privately)" on YouTube comments so you can see why those are there.

chimeracoder 13y ago
> If you remember what happened and think that G+ has had a hand in the leakage, please feel free to ping me (my URL is in my profile) and I'll try to follow it up Thanks for the offer - I really appreciate it. I think it had something to do with group contacts in Gmail, but I can't remember. If I have some time today I might take a look. To clarify: I'm not exactly mad at Google in this case, because I'm a developer and I know how tricky it can be to get these things right even in small, standalone products[0]. And unlike some people on HackerNews, I don't think this is a result of bad intentions. It's just that, every time I see something like this happen (beagle3 points out the example of Buzz below), I can't help but notice that users' trust is both fragile (easily broken) and unforgiving (no benefit of the doubt). These things are tough to get right, but they're very critical for the long-term success of a product. [0] Also, the consequences for me happened to be pretty mild, thankfully.
- rhizome 13y ago
  It sounds like it was a failure of design.
  - emn13 13y ago
    Then perhaps they shouldn't have taken the design into use until it was... usable. And it's really more than merely design in any case, it's at least a pretty core piece of underlying philosophy - connect everything to G+. It's one thing to do this if you're a new service, with users that don't have all kinds of baggage with you - if your UI isn't great they can choose to accept it for the value you offer or reject it. But existing users it's almost a kind of fraud - you convince em to join under a false pretense but then change the rules half way.

chimeracoder 13y ago

> If you remember what happened and think that G+ has had a hand in the leakage, please feel free to ping me (my URL is in my profile) and I'll try to follow it up Thanks for the offer - I really appreciate it. I think it had something to do with group contacts in Gmail, but I can't remember. If I have some time today I might take a look. To clarify: I'm not exactly mad at Google in this case, because I'm a developer and I know how tricky it can be to get these things right even in small, standalone products[0]. And unlike some people on HackerNews, I don't think this is a result of bad intentions. It's just that, every time I see something like this happen (beagle3 points out the example of Buzz below), I can't help but notice that users' trust is both fragile (easily broken) and unforgiving (no benefit of the doubt). These things are tough to get right, but they're very critical for the long-term success of a product. [0] Also, the consequences for me happened to be pretty mild, thankfully.

rhizome 13y ago
It sounds like it was a failure of design.
- emn13 13y ago
  Then perhaps they shouldn't have taken the design into use until it was... usable. And it's really more than merely design in any case, it's at least a pretty core piece of underlying philosophy - connect everything to G+. It's one thing to do this if you're a new service, with users that don't have all kinds of baggage with you - if your UI isn't great they can choose to accept it for the value you offer or reject it. But existing users it's almost a kind of fraud - you convince em to join under a false pretense but then change the rules half way.