Anyone else unnerved at all by Google's "Social Circle" and "Social Content" searches? Anyone else know about them?

So, apparently, Google now searches all of your social connections
(Twitter, Flickr, FriendFeed, Google Contacts, etc) for search results
that may be relevant to you. The thing is, your own content is
included for other folks to see, as well. I understand that all my
stuff is out there and nothing is private on the Internet and all
that, but I'm not sure I like that it's so easy to index and search it
all. It's not that I don't trust my friends, but Google (and other
services) will add total strangers to my contacts because I've sent or
received a single message/email to/from them. That doesn't mean
they're a friend or even trusted.

I think Google is quickly becoming a bit too Big-Brothery for my
tastes. After all, it's one thing to have a single porn mag in a pile
of National Geographics on your coffee table. It's another thing that
any guest to your home can instantly see the single porn mag and make
a copy of it instantly without your consent or ever knowing about it.
Any guest to your home, or say, a neighbor with a clear view of your
living room through a window, or someone walking by your home... you
get the idea.

It'd also be real nice if Google could announce these systems and
allow us to *opt-in* instead of making us stumble across these
invasive services and then have to dig around to find out how to
opt-out of them. In fact, I just spent a couple of minutes digging
around for a way to opt-out and couldn't find one. Why must I dig
around for anything on Google? I thought the point of Google was to
deliver information quickly and easily.

The closest I found was a way to stop seeing my circle's
content--Google says I can "simply log out of my Google account." AH
YES, because that's so simple! I log in to eight-thousand different
sites every day and now I have to log out of Google and back in when I
want to check my email again? It makes you wonder if the engineers at
Google actually use Google stuff themselves.

I just searched for "opt-out social" on Google's support forum and
found nothing useful.

I like Google for a lot of reasons, but the list of reasons I don't
like them is growing. Perhaps I need a new page on TheWikiPeteia...

Posted via email from thepete's posterous