Google ruining Christmas? Get a grip
Since I'm full of the milk of human kindness after a wonderful Christmas, I've been trying to remain calm in the face of all the Google Reader hysteria about shared items and so on — but wiping out on some ice yesterday and landing on my ass …
Context & Ripple Effects
On Christmas Day, a post reporting that Google Reader shares private data spread fast enough to draw same-day pickups from TechCrunch, Scobleizer, WebProNews, Insider Chatter and the New York Times' Bits blog — six outlets framing Reader's shared-items feature as a holiday privacy snitch.
Mathew Ingram's response is the contrarian counterweight: he argues the hysteria deserves a grip, not a panic. It is also the second December running that Google has taken a seasonal reputational hit, following its awkward Froogle holiday press party a year earlier.
First-order effects
- Users who treated Reader shares as private discover their reading activity is visible to chat contacts by default, and Google absorbs coordinated criticism from some of the highest-traffic tech blogs within 24 hours.
- Ingram's pushback splits the reaction into two camps — those reading the feature as a betrayal and those reading it as an overreaction — forcing the debate onto whether defaults or user intent define privacy.
Second-order effects
- Rival RSS readers gain a differentiation opening: explicit opt-in sharing becomes a marketable feature against Google's implicit-contact model.
- Google faces a product-design fork — keep frictionless defaults that build a social layer from existing contact lists, or add consent steps that blunt the backlash but slow adoption.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, consumer web services will keep deriving social graphs from data users already handed over (contact lists, chat rosters), making the default setting — not an explicit choice — the de facto privacy policy, with each flare-up raising the political cost of silent defaults.
The trend: Consumer web platforms are treating existing contact lists as ready-made social graphs, shifting the burden of privacy from explicit user consent to whatever the default happens to be.