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You can hide the reviews so that they don't show up on your Google+ profile. If they are hidden, you can only see someone's review by looking at a place that th

You can hide the reviews so that they don't show up on your Google+ profile. If they are hidden, you can only see someone's review by looking at a place that they've reviewed directly.

nounaut 12y ago
And you could probably scrape that information from every listed restaurant in the country in a matter of seconds.
- cloudwalking 12y ago
  Google does not let you scrape.
  - laumars 12y ago
    That doesn't mean that you cannot still write a bot to scrape the content. If it's displayable in a web browser, then it's also parsable from Perl (or whatever language you choose). Adding delays between page requests and/or distributing the requests would work around a lot of bot detection systems but in worst case scenario, there are projects out there that can solve Captcha's. Essentially this can be viewed like music of movie piracy; if it can be played then it can be copied.
    - cloudwalking 12y ago
      Sure, but throttling is going to make it really slow to gather all the data you want.
      - laumars 12y ago
        If you're stalking someone then you already have enough data to perform a more targeted scrape (ie what town to look up businesses from)
  - DanBC 12y ago
    Laws do not allow employers to use information about protected characteristics to discriminate against employees (or potential employees) yet people are rightly worried about revealing that information.
  - silverbax88 12y ago
    People scrape Google all of the time, every day. All day long.
x1798DE 12y ago
nounaut has the technological objection to this idea pretty much covered, but to add on to that, one of my problems is that Google has shown in many occasions that they simply don't understand why you would be concerned about keeping certain things private. That's what happened with Google Buzz, and it's something they didn't consider with their idiotic "real names" policy. The fact that you can hide your reviews today is great, but there's no forward secrecy on that. Google has shown a willingness to make privacy decisions for you in the past, and so I see no reason to trust that they won't come up with something new in the future that completely defeats the "hide my reviews" setting.
- timothya 12y ago
  I think Google cares more about privacy than most companies. Everyone (including Google[0]) agrees that they made privacy mistakes with Google Buzz. And I think that they've worked hard to improve privacy in their products since then. That's why Google+ has used circles from the beginning: the Google+ experience emphasizes choosing the right people to share you content with (as opposed to the standard "share with the public" or "share with all my friends" which was standard at the time). At the time when Google+ launched, it had one of the strongest sets of privacy settings on the market[1]. Other competitors have since beefed up their privacy settings to match Google. Regarding the "Real Names" policy, I think that their goal there was to make it a community of Real People, instead of a completely anonymous community of people using cryptic usernames. And I think that they thought that people would be more likely to make connections if people saw each other's real names instead of some username they came up with. When they realized that some people only go by a username and that most of their friends don't even know their real name, they started allowing people to add their nickname to their profile so that they could be findable with both their real name and their username. I think that these decisions were good ones and I like the community that now exists because of those policies. I agree that "Real Names" has privacy concerns, but before the policy change yesterday, Google+ had been saying that you didn't have to use your actual name if you were concerned about your privacy - you could just use any name that resembled an real name (i.e., John Smith). I agree that this is a bit wonky, but I think it was one of those hard tradeoffs. I think without such a policy, growth on Google+ would have been a lot slower, and the community would look very different. [0]: http://gmailblog.blogspot.ca/2010/02/new-buzz-start-up-experience-based-on.html http://gmailblog.blogspot.ca/2010/02/new-buzz-start-up-exper... [1]: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/18/privacy-isnt-dead-just-ask-google/ http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/18/privacy-isnt-dead-j...

You can hide the reviews so that they don't show up on your Google+ profile. If they are hidden, you can only see someone's review by looking at a place that they've reviewed directly.

nounaut 12y ago

And you could probably scrape that information from every listed restaurant in the country in a matter of seconds.

cloudwalking 12y ago
Google does not let you scrape.
- laumars 12y ago
  That doesn't mean that you cannot still write a bot to scrape the content. If it's displayable in a web browser, then it's also parsable from Perl (or whatever language you choose). Adding delays between page requests and/or distributing the requests would work around a lot of bot detection systems but in worst case scenario, there are projects out there that can solve Captcha's. Essentially this can be viewed like music of movie piracy; if it can be played then it can be copied.
  - cloudwalking 12y ago
    Sure, but throttling is going to make it really slow to gather all the data you want.
    - laumars 12y ago
      If you're stalking someone then you already have enough data to perform a more targeted scrape (ie what town to look up businesses from)
- DanBC 12y ago
  Laws do not allow employers to use information about protected characteristics to discriminate against employees (or potential employees) yet people are rightly worried about revealing that information.
- silverbax88 12y ago
  People scrape Google all of the time, every day. All day long.

x1798DE 12y ago

nounaut has the technological objection to this idea pretty much covered, but to add on to that, one of my problems is that Google has shown in many occasions that they simply don't understand why you would be concerned about keeping certain things private. That's what happened with Google Buzz, and it's something they didn't consider with their idiotic "real names" policy. The fact that you can hide your reviews today is great, but there's no forward secrecy on that. Google has shown a willingness to make privacy decisions for you in the past, and so I see no reason to trust that they won't come up with something new in the future that completely defeats the "hide my reviews" setting.

timothya 12y ago
I think Google cares more about privacy than most companies. Everyone (including Google[0]) agrees that they made privacy mistakes with Google Buzz. And I think that they've worked hard to improve privacy in their products since then. That's why Google+ has used circles from the beginning: the Google+ experience emphasizes choosing the right people to share you content with (as opposed to the standard "share with the public" or "share with all my friends" which was standard at the time). At the time when Google+ launched, it had one of the strongest sets of privacy settings on the market[1]. Other competitors have since beefed up their privacy settings to match Google. Regarding the "Real Names" policy, I think that their goal there was to make it a community of Real People, instead of a completely anonymous community of people using cryptic usernames. And I think that they thought that people would be more likely to make connections if people saw each other's real names instead of some username they came up with. When they realized that some people only go by a username and that most of their friends don't even know their real name, they started allowing people to add their nickname to their profile so that they could be findable with both their real name and their username. I think that these decisions were good ones and I like the community that now exists because of those policies. I agree that "Real Names" has privacy concerns, but before the policy change yesterday, Google+ had been saying that you didn't have to use your actual name if you were concerned about your privacy - you could just use any name that resembled an real name (i.e., John Smith). I agree that this is a bit wonky, but I think it was one of those hard tradeoffs. I think without such a policy, growth on Google+ would have been a lot slower, and the community would look very different. [0]: http://gmailblog.blogspot.ca/2010/02/new-buzz-start-up-experience-based-on.html http://gmailblog.blogspot.ca/2010/02/new-buzz-start-up-exper... [1]: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/18/privacy-isnt-dead-just-ask-google/ http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/18/privacy-isnt-dead-j...