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When you create a G+ profile, you explicitly must check a box that affirms that they are creating a publicly viewable profile for your account. That profile pag
by criley2 11y ago
When you create a G+ profile, you explicitly must check a box that affirms that they are creating a publicly viewable profile for your account. That profile page will, no matter what, be a public internet page with no permission filter at all.
You can then subsequently lock down features ON that page, such as hiding work information, hiding photos, hiding this, hiding that, (in fact, each of the dozens and dozens of options must be individually hidden), but the net result of that work is a public page with very little info on it.
By proxy, I can set my Facebook page to "visible to friends only" and even if you have a hardlink, you'll receieve a "page does not exist" error when you view it without logged-in whitelist (friend list) approval to even know the page exists.
I was never OK with the idea that, essentially, my android device had a public web page. A direct link between my data and a public profile page that I had no ability to remove access to.
As evidence of this I made a dummy G+ for a mostly unused Google account I have. Even though I turned off all features and hid all sections and turned on all privacy settings, and have added 0 content, 0 customization, 0 demographic settings (completely and totally blank G+ profile, no posts, nothing), the G+ dummy profile has "715 views" in the past year.
I made a fake G+ with no data and as private as possible, and it has been accessed about 700 times a year. That's not "privacy" to me. It's forced-public, searchable, etc. The best you can do is have a public profile page that you mark "do not search" (but which will still be crawled because search engines often crawl then hide instead of ignore).
You can never have privacy on G+ like Facebook, where you have a private page that does not even resolve as an address to non-friends.
- danellis 11y agoThat's default-public, not public-only. > I made a fake G+ with no data and as private as possible, and it has been accessed about 700 times a year. That's not "privacy" to me. You didn't say what information was revealed on the profile. If it was completely blank, then how is that a privacy issue?
- criley2 11y agoThe information revealed was: forced real name and existence of page. I do not want the existence of a profile to be known. I do not want social networks, search engines, and government organizations crawling and recording information from a profile page connected directly to my cellphone. I explained this: on Facebook, if you click a link to my profile it will say "sorry this link is invalid". If you click it on Google, despite my best attempts, it will say "Hey, this user exists, here is their full name, oh, they don't share anything else with you". That's an invasion of my privacy, to me, to have a public page that resolves and identifies me against my will. The fact that you're OK with 700 automated bots crawling a blank profile shows me that you don't respect your own information and data and are okay with literally dozens of organizations collecting personal information about you without your permission or knowledge. What do you think those 700 clicks are? People hitting a blank profile? They're bots, and they're data harvesters. The existence of a profile is great information to help build more complete profiles of me, my devices and accounts, and ultimately my browsing history, locations, purchasing histories, advertising history, etc.
- danellis 11y agoYour real name, apart from almost certainly not being unique, isn't private information anyway, so no privacy is being lost. > The fact that you're OK with 700 automated bots crawling a blank profile shows me that you don't respect your own information and data and are okay with literally dozens of organizations collecting personal information about you without your permission or knowledge. "blank profile" ... "personal information" -- this isn't even coherent. > without your permission They implicitly have my permission to crawl anything I allow to be public. That's what making something public means!
- criley2 11y ago"Your real name, apart from almost certainly not being unique, isn't private information anyway, so no privacy is being lost." Yes, privacy is being lost. I broke it down very simply: a public facing, crawlable webpage with a real-name is different than a NON-EXISTENT LINK. Do you understand the difference between a "This Page Does Not Exist" error, and a "Hey, this is the public profile for Real Name" page? Do you understand the difference between say "Google.com" and "lkskldjfklsdjsdf.com"? One being a public page, the other being a non-existent webpage that returns an error? I am shocked that your view of privacy is so broken that you cannot see the difference between publically posting a page on the public internet, accessible to literally every human on earth, and a whitelisted access page that has a total of about 300 human beings who can see it. Do you understand why accessible to 5,000,000,000 is different than 300? Then you can begin to understand privacy.