How Google Profiles lost my seal of approval

There’s been a bit of news recently going around lately regarding attempts by Google to spruce up user profile pages through Picasa photos. This was rather expected, since social media is one of the areas that Google has struggled with (for example, see what a failure Buzz is). I use Picasa web albums right now as a small online storage space for my photos, but I’m very much on the fence about whether I’m willing to dump money for expanded storage or just get another HDD or two. Might honestly have to look into some kind of backup system that is a little more robust — who knows when my current drive is going to fail me and I’ll lose all my photos, and work… again.

Hell, I wonder that about this blog. At any time WordPress could undergo some massive failure and all of it – gone. Sometimes I wonder if that would be for the best.

But I digress. What caused me to go wide-eyed with surprise was something lurking under the surface of these profile changes. And it is certainly not typical for me to rant about Google.

What was hiding behind the curtains… can be found after the skip.

The source of my ire ended up being a message I received upon loading up my profile page tonight. I was being compelled to update my profile to display my full name on my profile. The alternative…? Delete my profile.

That took a few seconds to fully sink in.

Now, I’m not someone who uses my profile often. Hell, I barely took time to set it up. To me, the profile page was just another connective tissue between the Google products I use on my account, not something akin to my Facebook profile or my Twitter account, no matter how much Google wants it to be. I preferred to keep it to myself, and make it not easily searchable by removing my email from the URL. Furthermore, the profile doesn’t really do all that much; you can run all your other Google services without a profile page and it doesn’t make any difference to them at all aside from your profile picture showing up in places.

Google does provide a link on the message that leads to a help page for profiles. To paraphrase it, it says that “we think that the best way to use Google Profiles is to help people find you, private profiles don’t help people find you, so all profiles are public. You can accept this, delete your profile or do nothing. If you do nothing, we’ll delete your profile for you.”

Okay then. Profile deleted.

I’m not going to start with inane ranting about how Google is the coming of the digital anti-christ like you might find on some forums. I still will continue to use many Google products and services, my Android phone, Gmail, Calendars, Docs, Search, Chrome, etc. among them. But don’t you ever threaten my privacy Google — and I’m already fairly aware of your data handling policies regarding search results.

In the end, this isn’t as big an problem as I might make it out to be, because Google Profiles isn’t really essential nor central to any of Google’s services. A minor privacy settings change on Facebook carries far more risk — given how much people share on Facebook, the fact that it has over 500 million users (at this time). And to be honest, you can find my name on Facebook right out there in the open as well. Still – given the option of having my name in two places, and the second place having everything out in the open should I opt to use it, I’d rather limit my exposure.