Google graduates social stalking tool Google's social network stalking aid has graduated from the company's experimental Labs site to prime-time on Google.com. In the next few days, with its Social Search tool, Google will let English-language users scour for publicly-available content produced by friends and online contacts . To use social search, users need to …
Even if, like me, you have actively avoided the great online morass that is social networking, your personal data may still be discoverable.
I have relatives who insist on posting images and names on FailBook (etc), without permission.
"Let's have a family photo......for FaceBook"
*click*
gman: upload your entire online presence to Google
will you let me search through stuff my 'friends' upload? I'm a bit of a voyeur you see.
gman: we'll give you permission to do that, yes
permission?
gman: didn't you read the fine print? those are our social networking accounts now, you just lease them from us muahahahaha
etc
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«Google said that because it envisions several additions to Social Search in the future, it's putting a "beta" tag on the service - which, considering Google's history with such things, could remain there a good long while.» Austine Modine might want to compare the length of time Chrome for Windows wore a «beta» tag with the length of time IE8 did so....
Henri
I have found it really difficult to convince children about how careful they need to be in their use of network sites.
On about day 2, having been promised that they understood about not putting anything personal up, I discovered that the group were all happily identifying which school they went to. A few days later, messages on friends' walls were accompanied by photos.
I like to think that explaining that they do not want to put on anything that they do not want their teachers (or me?) to read had a little effect towards explaining what should be left off.
And now this !!!
On the other hand, perhaps it will help to finally get through to them just how publicly available is anything they put onto the network site, just like letting the whole world read what is on their screen.
I think that more than tinfoil hats are needed. This is modern slavery.
The simplest solution is to stop using Google then maybe Google will go back to being a really useful means of delivering adverts about businesses (something we are looking for) and leave our privacy alone (we don't want to be shown adverts based on our 'peer group').
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