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Google+ is going bye bye. It shall not be missed. | |
October 08th, 2018 | |
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Just saw this on BoingBoing, thought it was interesting... Apparently | |
Google is pulling the plug on Google+, I won't miss the damn thing, it | |
was so clunky compared to most of the competition, and practically | |
nobody I know uses it. | |
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Full repost from BoingBoing.net | |
By Cory Doctorow, originally published 11:25 AM, 8 October 2018 | |
License, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 | |
RIP, Google+: long ailing and finished off by a security bug | |
There was a time when you could get the smartest people at Google to do | |
the stupidest things you could imagine by getting Yahoo to do them | |
first; thankfully that era ended -- only to be replaced by an era in | |
which every stupid thing Facebook did became a bucket-list item for | |
Google management. | |
The peak of this was when Google set out to create a social network and | |
tasked every googler with making it a success. The company decided to | |
call this network Google+, and decided that the longstanding, widely | |
used plus-sign (which historically was used in search queries to mean | |
"must have" as in +cory +doctorow) would be unilaterally repurposed for | |
use in its social network. | |
Googlers' bonuses were tied to their ability to integrate Google+ into | |
every product Google offered, creating an ever-tightening noose around | |
Google users who had no interest in using G+. | |
To make matters worse, Google decided to ape Facebook's privacy- | |
invading, nonsensical "real names" policy, insisting that every user | |
use their legal name and putting Google in the unenviable position of | |
deciding (for example) when a trans person could stop using their dead- | |
name, or when an indigenous person's name was "real" enough for use, or | |
when people fleeing domestic violence could use an alias. | |
By the time Google+ rolled out, there was already nascent discontent | |
with Facebook. Google+ offered all the downsides of Facebook, but with | |
fewer of the people you wanted to connect with. | |
Years later, G+ is a sad also-ran. What's more, the company just | |
discovered an extremely grave bug in the system - -- that would have | |
allowed for serious privacy violations. Though the company says it has | |
fixed the bug, it's taken the opportunity to simply shut down G+ for | |
"consumers" (the service will persist for enterprise users, who | |
apparently use it). | |
In the product's obituary, Google wrote that Google+ "has not achieved | |
broad consumer or developer adoption, and has seen limited user | |
interaction with apps." | |
One bright spot in all this: the defect in Google+ was discovered | |
through "Project Strobe," a serious privacy and security audit of every | |
Google product. | |
Our review showed that our Google+ APIs, and the associated | |
controls for consumers, are challenging to develop and maintain. | |
Underlining this, as part of our Project Strobe audit, we | |
discovered a bug in one of the Google+ People APIs: | |
* Users can grant access to their Profile data, and the public | |
Profile information of their friends, to Google+ apps, via the API | |
* The bug meant that apps also had access to Profile fields that | |
were shared with the user, but not marked as public. | |
* This data is limited to static, optional Google+ Profile fields | |
including name, email address, occupation, gender and age. (See | |
the full list on our developer site.) It does not include any | |
other data you may have posted or connected to Google+ or any | |
other service, like Google+ posts, messages, Google account data, | |
phone numbers or G Suite content. | |
Project Strobe: Protecting your data, improving our third-party APIs, | |
and sunsetting consumer Google+ [Ben Smith/Google Blog] | |
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