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Google will make it easy for strangers to email you
- jfb 13y agoI actually don't understand the sound and fury over this; it seems perfectly reasonable to me.
- andylei 13y ago> anyone on its social network will be able to send messages to your Gmail inbox. i don't get it. isn't that how email works? what people are currently not allowed to send messages to my gmail inbox?
- jaredsohn 13y agoThe difference is that you don't need to know what the person's email address is. On Facebook, you can send a message to anyone from their profile, but it shows up within Facebook rather than the person's e-mail client (and it shows up in 'other' too.) Edit: Facebook did not email me the last time I received something in my Other inbox (but that was a couple of years ago); perhaps that has changed? Edit2: Being able to send a Google+ message from your e-mail client is a nice convenience that takes advantage of the fact that Google owns both properties. (It would be nice if it also provided a lookup for Facebook users.) I think that is all that this is, which means there is no controversy. I imagine you could already write someone a message that shows up in their email without knowing what their email address is by messaging them within Google+. If that is the case, this change is purely an added convenience that doesn't impact spamming at all.
- jayd16 13y agoExcept that Facebook will also email you about that unless you opt-out just like Google+.
- chilldream 13y agoFacebook didn't staple their social network onto a non-social-network service after the fact, and then demand you sign up for it. Not everyone on Google+ actually wants to be on Google+.
- jere 13y ago>The difference is that you don't need to know what the person's email address is. And that prevents what exactly... people sending you email? I don't get it.
- wmf 13y agoSome people are really touchy about receiving mail from anyone they don't already know. Based on this thread, quite a few people.
- jerf 13y agoEmail has a light-weight de facto security system where people can't send you an email without knowing your address. Obviously, this isn't perfect, and it was never truly a security feature, but, nevertheless, it is there, and for all of its manifold and obvious faults, it mostly works this way. People are used to this. Taking it away will bother people.
- brownbat 13y ago> The difference is that you don't need to know what the person's email address is. Now they need to know a different piece of pseudo-public information, your G+ username. Isn't this just a lateral shift? I mean, there's still a "report spam" button, right?
- shric 13y agoThose who know your name but not your email address.
- bane 13y agoEven better, pretty much anytime anybody does anything on my facebook page I get an email from FB letting me know about it. Marco has clearly just lost it.
- joelrunyon 13y agoBut that person isn't directly emailing you.
- nhangen 13y agoExactly. Perhaps parent has lost it.
- res0nat0r 13y agoGood lord these Facebook / Google hate posts are getting out of control and are becoming comical in their faux rage IMO. Do we have a name for a new meme where if a company makes more than X billions of dollars we automatically hate them no matter what they do? My email address has never been opt-in, ever since I started using email back in 1994. Don't want people to email / communicate with you, maybe you shouldn't sign up for a social network? Google is linking your GoogleMail inbox to your Google+ account to facilitate communication. Don't like it? Opt out and calm down.
- nhangen 13y agoThe point is that we want to like Google, but they're making it difficult. Quit confusing frustration for hate. You're right that we can delete our G+ account. The point is that we're trying to explain to Google why it might not be in their best interest to add 'features' like this, at least without an opt-out mechanism.
- res0nat0r 13y agoOpt out is located at: Gmail Settings > Email Via Google+ > Who can email you via your Google+ profile? > No one.
- lostsock 13y agoThe uproar is over someone being able to send email to you using your name (or your G+ profile in this case) without you explicitly giving them your email address... I don't get it either
- IBM 13y agoThis is the type of thing that the X Labs projects are meant to distract from. Google is a company that has decided to flip the switch and monetize everything they possibly can, and are attempting to remain relevant and perceived as innovative in the eyes of its various stakeholders: employees, shareholders, tech press, the general public, regulators, etc. They are the new Microsoft, but they still want you to view them as the Google when it was first going public.
- cjensen 13y agoMarco is a bit too vitriolic about this, but I think the main point stands: Letting anybody email you, even if you have tried to keep your email address private, is a pretty stupid idea. It should default to opt-in or possibly default to allowing your G+ contacts to mail you.
- csallen 13y agoWhat, exactly, makes it stupid? Worst-case scenario: a few people email you, you get annoyed, delete their emails, and opt-out. Am I missing something?
- hobs 13y agoThe part where you opt-in.
- csallen 13y agoThe point of my comment is that it's perfectly fine without opt-in.
- pingswept 13y agoI think it's the "you get annoyed" step that people would prefer to avoid by default, rather than having it imposed on them by default.
- hobs 13y agoI understand that, and it is perfectly fine to have that opinion, you just may find that many disagree with that opinion.
- csallen 13y agoMore specifically, the point of my comment was to give several reasons why opt-out was okay, and in return I was hoping to get a contradictory perspective providing reasons why it's not okay. A discussion that never goes beyond "I (dis)agree" isn't much of a discussion.
- Sargos 13y agoI don't understand why this is such a bad thing. Email is not really a private network. Anyone can send you email at any time just like they could send you a letter without your permission. Requiring this to be opt-in seems a bit crazy to me. This just makes communication with people you already have a sort-of relationship with easier. Seems like an all around good thing. If you really, really feel like only a whitelist of people should ever contact you then you can always go into the options and turn it off. But why would you?
- usea 13y agoA minor nitpick: the default setting is "Anyone on Google+" so they don't have to have any relationship with you at all.
- statictype 13y agoDoes anyone on Google+ currently need to have a relationship with you to send you email?
- hobs 13y agoThey do need to know my email address, which isnt publicly available. They can add me on google+, which I dont care about, I do however care about anyone who can sign up an account sending me annoying emails.
- wmf 13y agoYou can already share a G+ post with a specific person and it will create a notification on the Google bar; is this so much worse?
- fpgeek 13y agoAnd generate a notification email unless you've gone and disabled that...
- locusm 13y ago"Emailing Google+ connections also takes advantage of Gmail's new inbox's categories." This seems broken for me, I have to delete both unwanted emails from my inbox in addition to the category, even though I dont use the categories feature per se.
- logn 13y agoBy the time Google wins the social network war, it probably won't even be worth winning. The social network will be like usenet of last generation. Meanwhile they'll have succeeded in upsetting all the power users and uber geeks, who are the people lending credibility to their brand. And I certainly don't see the Snapchat generation coming along for the Google+ ride either.
- joelrunyon 13y agoThis is really interesting. Google seems deadset on catching up to facebook, but facebook is already trying to catchup to snapchat & the next wave of "social" - which seems decidedly more private. It's almost as if by trying to catchup to FB - google is only falling further behind.
- mml 13y agoI feel bad for John Smith.
- izzydata 13y agoI already get no emails and I doubt that will change. If some people I put on my google+ send me some emails then I'll welcome that. I wouldn't have put spam bots in my circles in the first place.
- hobs 13y agoThe default is they do not need to be in your circles.
- JosephHatfield 13y agoAgree that this should be opt-in only. Google may believe that people wouldn't use the feature if they had to go to the trouble of enabling it. BTW, it appears that this feature cannot be used to spam others. If you receive such an email and simply delete it, the sender will not be able to send you any more messages. That is, Google only lets senders continue to email you only if you respond to the first message.
- ghaff 13y agoPersonally, I don't care. I can imagine scenarios though where someone has a huge following on social media but wants to keep their email private to a relatively small circle. This may be an edge case but nonetheless it probably exists.
- JosephHatfield 13y agoUnderstood. Note that, apparently, if you DO respond to one of these messages, the original sender is actually provided with your email address. Here's the text of a message I just received from Google: "How it works with email addresses Emailing Google+ connections works a bit differently to protect the privacy of email addresses. Your email address isn't visible to your Google+ connections until you send them an email, and their email addresses are not visible to you until they respond. "
- damian2000 13y agoIsn't this the same as Twitter emailing you the contents of a DM everytime someone DMs you? Because the person sending the mail doesn't actually see your email address, only your username.
- mmahemoff 13y agoThe difference is you have to be following the sender, otherwise they can't DM you. Though it's pretty silly and Twitter did remove the restriction recently, temporarily. They'll need to work on it if they want to make DMs more useful. Anyway, I do actually think this is useful functionality. It can only be sent from another GMail user, so Google will quickly know if it's being abused.
- spikexxx 13y agoYou can only DM someone who follows you. As described, people don't have to be in your circles, it's open to the world.
- interpol_p 13y agoIt's a little different, though not in practice. It's more a difference of semantics. On Facebook / Twitter you are receiving a notification through their service, and then their service is emailing you about said notification (likely with the contents of the message). With this it maps your email address to your public Google+ name, and auto-fills your name for anyone who wishes to contact you through Gmail, which appears as a regular email client. You receive the email as a normal email (as far as I'm aware, may be not the case). I suspect a lot of the anger stems from this subtle distinction. With Facebook and Twitter, when you sign up for the account you also sign up for the relevant notifications. With this Gmail feature, many people did not sign up for their public G+ name to be mapped to their email address, your name auto-completing in other peoples' "To:" fields. That said, I don't really have an issue with this feature because I don't have a G+ account, and if I did have a G+ account I'd probably find it pretty useful.
- nhangen 13y agoI totally get this. My gmail address is a treasure, and I treat it as such. I hand it out to people that I'm OK getting emails from. Everyone else gets a work email or a misc email that I check less often. Beyond that, since Google uses emails for login, this essentially gives someone half of the equation to hack your account. It also enables spammers to quickly collect legit emails for their spam lists.
- darren_ 13y agoThis feature doesn't reveal your email address unless you reply. And the message goes to the 'social' tab if you're using the tabbed inbox (it'll probably be easy to filter if you're not, but I have no idea) I really doubt spammers are going to find these useful for harvesting.
- nhangen 13y agoYou're right, just found this: "Your email address isn't visible to your Google+ connections until you send them an email, and their email addresses are not visible to you until they respond." Doesn't change my opinion on the 'feature,' but does make it less painful. I wonder if the backlash in this thread has more to do with people's distaste for Marco than it does with the issue at hand.
- tlunter 13y agoFrom what I've read, they don't see your email nor will. Not sure how this is half the equation to hack your account and also doesn't give spammers anything. Please be realistic.
- nhangen 13y agoI had assumed that after sending, they could view the 'sent' tab and see the address, opening up your username and your actual email. It seems this isn't the case, but that doesn't make it any less troubling. How does this help anyone other than people that didn't have the email already?
- waps 13y ago
- greenwalls 13y agoThere is always the option to delete your G+ account, yet keep Gmail. http://www.wikihow.com/Delete-a-Google%2B-Account http://www.wikihow.com/Delete-a-Google%2B-Account
- statictype 13y agomarco.org (which shows ads - don't worry, I removed it for you) writes: You’re just eyeballs. Body parts and ad-targeting data. Google doesn’t care about you at all. You’ve tolerated enough already that it’s pretty clear you’re not really going anywhere. Couldn't you say the same about any company? Say, developers and Apple? You're just dollar signs and app figures. Apple doesn't care about you at all. You've tolerated enough already that it's pretty clear you're not really going anywhere.
- tptacek 13y agoNo, you can't necessarily say that about other companies. Apple, for instance, doesn't have an ad-sponsored business model. Its offerings have to be attractive to end-users, or its products won't command their premium.
- statictype 13y agoGoogle's offerings have to be attractive to end-users. Otherwise end-users will not use them and Google won't be able to sell targeted advertising any more. Next.
- tptacek 13y agoGoogle is freer to make concessions that are unfavorable to users because those concessions are subsidized by third parties that do not meaningfully exist to subsidize concessions for Apple.
- smegel 13y agoGoogle promised to not be evil.
- officemonkey 13y agoPlease, if Corporations truly are people, then they're psychopaths. Corporations will do whatever it takes to make a buck. Expecting them to have a moral center is like expecting a shark to do calculus.
- dannyrosen 13y agoToday is Christmas for the recruiting industry
- chaz 13y agoIf Google built this as "people can send you messages on Google+," and you get a notification in G+, wouldn't that be perfectly normal for a social network? And in addition to that notification, you get an email, saying that "John Smith has sent you a message on Google+," isn't that pretty normal as well? Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all do this by default. I don't think it's that much different if the from: tag is changed from "Google+ Notifications" to "John Smith" and the subject is changed accordingly. The in-Gmail treatment looks reasonable to me, based on Google's blog post. [edited for clarity]
- jfb 13y agoI mean, I don't use Gmail, or G+, but isn't innovation in messaging a good thing? Mail needs a good rethink, and yeah, maybe I'd prefer it to be by someone other than Google, but I have a hard time seeing malicious intent here.
- cjoh 13y agoPlus, One actually has much more control over my inbox than one does over Google+ Notifications.
- Zigurd 13y agoYou can send a private message to anyone on Google+ that way right now. A limiting factor is that unless you are following that person, or they are following you, there might be too many matches to the name for Google+ to find the right John Smith, for example.
- obtino 13y agoThe whole Google+ integration is pathetic! I don't want to be able to "chat" to anyone following me from "Hangouts". The whole concept is a pile of dung!
- rickyc091 13y agoDoesn't this require you to follow them first before they can message you? Also how is this different from someone reaching out to you on twitter that you don't follow?
- chilldream 13y agoTo the first, it defaults to "anyone on Google+" To the second, Google+ is unique among social networks in that large swaths of its userbase didn't voluntarily sign up for it.
- thrownaway2424 13y agoI like it when Marco quotes Gruber or Gruber quotes Marco. It's like a cyclone of fucknozzlery whipping itself into the perfect pointless storm of impotent mactard rage. Regarding the feature it seems pretty good. It will definitely help normal people find each other and communicate more and maybe will cut down on people mailing me because they make mistyped or guessed someone else's address.
- jaredhansen 13y ago> fucknozzlery, mactard Is this kind of thing really necessary? OK, you don't like them, we get it. But language like this does nothing to elevate the tone of the discussion. Sorry to nitpick on what may well be a valid point (I don't follow either of their writing enough to know), but come on - why not just to be a bit more civil?
- thrownaway2424 13y agoThis discussion was already beyond redemption. I'm just playing down to its level. If you want to have a serious discussion about this Google product feature, let's start. These two clowns excerpting each others' fact-free rants hasn't started that discussion.
- jrockway 13y agoMarco knows his audience. If his goal was to publish a blog post that made it to the top of HN, he succeeded.
- SmileyKeith 13y agoThat is never his goal.
- dkuntz2 13y agoOkay, he still succeeded in his goal of fear mongering and making everyone scream "controversy".
- Zigurd 13y agoI'm not sure there will be bad effects from this. If you know my first name you can find my GMail and Google Apps email addresses (and all my social media profiles, Amazon pages, etc.) Spam is still minimal.
- ScotterC 13y agoApologize for off-topic, but what's wrong with target="_blank" in an anchor?
- buttsex 13y agoWhat's so bad about target="_blank"?
- john2x 13y agoSome possible reasons: - "breaks" browser history - obsolete with middle-click, open-in-new-tab - doesn't work well on mobile? - it's a coin toss whether or not the link you're opening will open in a new page or not on mobile
- brownbat 13y agoI'd be more worried, but Google has actively fought against spammers and abuse of their services in the past, and I doubt they've suddenly concluded that user experience doesn't matter. It might be sensible to at least wait and see how bad the abuse gets before calling Google "sleazy" for opening the doors to massive abuse.
- bane 13y agoThis is a silly post (I'm using a less incendiary word than I'm thinking) and is already discussed here in other comments. Google is clearly relying on their very good anti-spam software and ownership of the socialnetwork to keep your inbox clean from spam.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- nhangen 13y agoI find it funny that on the very same site where we see an endless supply of NSA privacy-invasion complaints, we also see an impressive defense in support of Google's efforts to the same. Do ya'll hate Marco that much?
- chilldream 13y agoMan, I hate Google+ as much as the next person, and I was this close to defending them here. They almost did it right. Almost. The problem is that it defaults to "Everyone on Google+" For those of you mystified that this is pissing people off, it's because not everyone on Google+ wanted a Google+ account precisely because Google is shoehorning it into everything! "Just opt out" misses the point; some of us don't want to have to dig around in settings for a service we didn't want to opt out of stuff like being put on a spammable directory for strangers. If it defaulted to "Circles" I'd have a hard time complaining about it; people who don't want Google+ don't have Circles. But as it stands, this is "we're quietly opting you into spam." (and for those who say it won't happen, I've already gotten more YouTube spam since the G+ rollout than I have over the rest of the account's lifetime combined, and my YouTube account is old)
- r00fus 13y agoTip for those of you who want to limit/remove this feature, it's found in the main settings page (General tab) between "Conversation View" and "Send and Archive".
- omonra 13y agoA lot of fury over nothing. If someone is sufficiently bothered to even write a comment in this thread (let alone pen an original genuine article), they can opt-out - since the directions are laid out in the email I received about the news. Just like we call some problems 'first world problem', I'd call this '15 second annoyance'. Ie the worst case scenario is that you have to spend 15 seconds fixing something - not the end of the world. I am more bothered (and think there is a level of difference) between this and cases where Google does something you can't opt-out of (such as change Compose window in Gmail or shut down a service). Those are real issues.