Google will make it easy for strangers to email you

http://www.marco.org/2014/01/09/more-google-sleaze

by jfb • 13 years ago

75 105 13 years ago

marco.org

jfb2• 13 years ago

I actually don't understand the sound and fury over this; it seems perfectly reasonable to me.

andylei• 13 years ago

anyone on its social network will be able to send messages to your Gmail inbox.

i don't get it. isn't that how email works? what people are currently not allowed to send messages to my gmail inbox?

jaredsohn• 13 years ago

The difference is that you don't need to know what the person's email address is.

On Facebook, you can send a message to anyone from their profile, but it shows up within Facebook rather than the person's e-mail client (and it shows up in 'other' too.)

Edit: Facebook did not email me the last time I received something in my Other inbox (but that was a couple of years ago); perhaps that has changed?

Edit2: Being able to send a Google+ message from your e-mail client is a nice convenience that takes advantage of the fact that Google owns both properties. (It would be nice if it also provided a lookup for Facebook users.) I think that is all that this is, which means there is no controversy. I imagine you could already write someone a message that shows up in their email without knowing what their email address is by messaging them within Google+. If that is the case, this change is purely an added convenience that doesn't impact spamming at all.

jayd16• 13 years ago

Except that Facebook will also email you about that unless you opt-out just like Google+.

jere• 13 years ago

The difference is that you don't need to know what the person's email address is.

And that prevents what exactly... people sending you email? I don't get it.

brownbat2• 13 years ago

The difference is that you don't need to know what the person's email address is.

Now they need to know a different piece of pseudo-public information, your G+ username. Isn't this just a lateral shift?

I mean, there's still a "report spam" button, right?

shric• 13 years ago

Those who know your name but not your email address.

bane3• 13 years ago

Even better, pretty much anytime anybody does anything on my facebook page I get an email from FB letting me know about it.

Marco has clearly just lost it.

joelrunyon2• 13 years ago

But that person isn't directly emailing you.

lostsock• 13 years ago

The uproar is over someone being able to send email to you using your name (or your G+ profile in this case) without you explicitly giving them your email address... I don't get it either

IBM• 13 years ago

This is the type of thing that the X Labs projects are meant to distract from. Google is a company that has decided to flip the switch and monetize everything they possibly can, and are attempting to remain relevant and perceived as innovative in the eyes of its various stakeholders: employees, shareholders, tech press, the general public, regulators, etc. They are the new Microsoft, but they still want you to view them as the Google when it was first going public.

cjensen• 13 years ago

Marco is a bit too vitriolic about this, but I think the main point stands: Letting anybody email you, even if you have tried to keep your email address private, is a pretty stupid idea. It should default to opt-in or possibly default to allowing your G+ contacts to mail you.

csallen3• 13 years ago

What, exactly, makes it stupid? Worst-case scenario: a few people email you, you get annoyed, delete their emails, and opt-out. Am I missing something?

hobs5• 13 years ago

The part where you opt-in.

Mikeb852• 13 years ago

Please, my email is firstname.lastname @ gmail. A lot of people do this. Email isn't private.

At worst, this is a mild G+ related annoyance...

Sargos• 13 years ago

I don't understand why this is such a bad thing. Email is not really a private network. Anyone can send you email at any time just like they could send you a letter without your permission. Requiring this to be opt-in seems a bit crazy to me.

This just makes communication with people you already have a sort-of relationship with easier. Seems like an all around good thing. If you really, really feel like only a whitelist of people should ever contact you then you can always go into the options and turn it off. But why would you?

usea• 13 years ago

A minor nitpick: the default setting is "Anyone on Google+" so they don't have to have any relationship with you at all.

statictype3• 13 years ago

Does anyone on Google+ currently need to have a relationship with you to send you email?

wmf2• 13 years ago

You can already share a G+ post with a specific person and it will create a notification on the Google bar; is this so much worse?

fpgeek• 13 years ago

And generate a notification email unless you've gone and disabled that...

locusm• 13 years ago

"Emailing Google+ connections also takes advantage of Gmail's new inbox's categories."

This seems broken for me, I have to delete both unwanted emails from my inbox in addition to the category, even though I dont use the categories feature per se.

logn• 13 years ago

By the time Google wins the social network war, it probably won't even be worth winning. The social network will be like usenet of last generation. Meanwhile they'll have succeeded in upsetting all the power users and uber geeks, who are the people lending credibility to their brand. And I certainly don't see the Snapchat generation coming along for the Google+ ride either.

joelrunyon2• 13 years ago

This is really interesting.

Google seems deadset on catching up to facebook, but facebook is already trying to catchup to snapchat & the next wave of "social" - which seems decidedly more private.

It's almost as if by trying to catchup to FB - google is only falling further behind.

mml• 13 years ago

I feel bad for John Smith.

izzydata• 13 years ago

I already get no emails and I doubt that will change. If some people I put on my google+ send me some emails then I'll welcome that. I wouldn't have put spam bots in my circles in the first place.

hobs5• 13 years ago

The default is they do not need to be in your circles.

JosephHatfield2• 13 years ago

Agree that this should be opt-in only. Google may believe that people wouldn't use the feature if they had to go to the trouble of enabling it. BTW, it appears that this feature cannot be used to spam others. If you receive such an email and simply delete it, the sender will not be able to send you any more messages. That is, Google only lets senders continue to email you only if you respond to the first message.

ghaff• 13 years ago

Personally, I don't care. I can imagine scenarios though where someone has a huge following on social media but wants to keep their email private to a relatively small circle. This may be an edge case but nonetheless it probably exists.

JosephHatfield2• 13 years ago

Understood. Note that, apparently, if you DO respond to one of these messages, the original sender is actually provided with your email address. Here's the text of a message I just received from Google:

"How it works with email addresses

Emailing Google+ connections works a bit differently to protect the privacy of email addresses. Your email address isn't visible to your Google+ connections until you send them an email, and their email addresses are not visible to you until they respond. "

damian2000• 13 years ago

Isn't this the same as Twitter emailing you the contents of a DM everytime someone DMs you? Because the person sending the mail doesn't actually see your email address, only your username.

mmahemoff• 13 years ago

The difference is you have to be following the sender, otherwise they can't DM you. Though it's pretty silly and Twitter did remove the restriction recently, temporarily. They'll need to work on it if they want to make DMs more useful.

Anyway, I do actually think this is useful functionality. It can only be sent from another GMail user, so Google will quickly know if it's being abused.

spikexxx• 13 years ago

You can only DM someone who follows you. As described, people don't have to be in your circles, it's open to the world.

interpol_p• 13 years ago

It's a little different, though not in practice. It's more a difference of semantics.

On Facebook / Twitter you are receiving a notification through their service, and then their service is emailing you about said notification (likely with the contents of the message).

With this it maps your email address to your public Google+ name, and auto-fills your name for anyone who wishes to contact you through Gmail, which appears as a regular email client. You receive the email as a normal email (as far as I'm aware, may be not the case).

I suspect a lot of the anger stems from this subtle distinction. With Facebook and Twitter, when you sign up for the account you also sign up for the relevant notifications. With this Gmail feature, many people did not sign up for their public G+ name to be mapped to their email address, your name auto-completing in other peoples' "To:" fields.

That said, I don't really have an issue with this feature because I don't have a G+ account, and if I did have a G+ account I'd probably find it pretty useful.

nhangen7• 13 years ago

I totally get this. My gmail address is a treasure, and I treat it as such. I hand it out to people that I'm OK getting emails from. Everyone else gets a work email or a misc email that I check less often.

Beyond that, since Google uses emails for login, this essentially gives someone half of the equation to hack your account.

It also enables spammers to quickly collect legit emails for their spam lists.

darren_• 13 years ago

This feature doesn't reveal your email address unless you reply. And the message goes to the 'social' tab if you're using the tabbed inbox (it'll probably be easy to filter if you're not, but I have no idea)

I really doubt spammers are going to find these useful for harvesting.

nhangen7• 13 years ago

You're right, just found this:

"Your email address isn't visible to your Google+ connections until you send them an email, and their email addresses are not visible to you until they respond."

Doesn't change my opinion on the 'feature,' but does make it less painful. I wonder if the backlash in this thread has more to do with people's distaste for Marco than it does with the issue at hand.

tlunter• 13 years ago

From what I've read, they don't see your email nor will. Not sure how this is half the equation to hack your account and also doesn't give spammers anything. Please be realistic.

nhangen7• 13 years ago

I had assumed that after sending, they could view the 'sent' tab and see the address, opening up your username and your actual email. It seems this isn't the case, but that doesn't make it any less troubling.

How does this help anyone other than people that didn't have the email already?

waps• 13 years ago

Wow, if your mailbox is like mine, you must hate "reply to all" with equal passion.

greenwalls• 13 years ago

There is always the option to delete your G+ account, yet keep Gmail. http://www.wikihow.com/Delete-a-Google%2B-Account

statictype3• 13 years ago

marco.org (which shows ads - don't worry, I removed it for you) writes:

You’re just eyeballs. Body parts and ad-targeting data. Google doesn’t care about you at all. You’ve tolerated enough already that it’s pretty clear you’re not really going anywhere.

Couldn't you say the same about any company? Say, developers and Apple?

You're just dollar signs and app figures. Apple doesn't care about you at all. You've tolerated enough already that it's pretty clear you're not really going anywhere.

tptacek2• 13 years ago

No, you can't necessarily say that about other companies. Apple, for instance, doesn't have an ad-sponsored business model. Its offerings have to be attractive to end-users, or its products won't command their premium.

statictype3• 13 years ago

Google's offerings have to be attractive to end-users. Otherwise end-users will not use them and Google won't be able to sell targeted advertising any more.

Next.

smegel• 13 years ago

Google promised to not be evil.

officemonkey• 13 years ago

Please, if Corporations truly are people, then they're psychopaths. Corporations will do whatever it takes to make a buck. Expecting them to have a moral center is like expecting a shark to do calculus.

redthrowaway2• 13 years ago

Many moons ago, when the money flowed freely and they faced no existential threats. Google's a corporation like any other, and better than most. That doesn't mean their founding principle is benevolence.

dannyrosen• 13 years ago

Today is Christmas for the recruiting industry

chaz• 13 years ago

If Google built this as "people can send you messages on Google+," and you get a notification in G+, wouldn't that be perfectly normal for a social network? And in addition to that notification, you get an email, saying that "John Smith has sent you a message on Google+," isn't that pretty normal as well? Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all do this by default.

I don't think it's that much different if the from: tag is changed from "Google+ Notifications" to "John Smith" and the subject is changed accordingly. The in-Gmail treatment looks reasonable to me, based on Google's blog post. [edited for clarity]

jfb2• 13 years ago

I mean, I don't use Gmail, or G+, but isn't innovation in messaging a good thing? Mail needs a good rethink, and yeah, maybe I'd prefer it to be by someone other than Google, but I have a hard time seeing malicious intent here.

cjoh• 13 years ago

Plus, One actually has much more control over my inbox than one does over Google+ Notifications.

Zigurd2• 13 years ago

You can send a private message to anyone on Google+ that way right now.

A limiting factor is that unless you are following that person, or they are following you, there might be too many matches to the name for Google+ to find the right John Smith, for example.

obtino• 13 years ago

The whole Google+ integration is pathetic! I don't want to be able to "chat" to anyone following me from "Hangouts". The whole concept is a pile of dung!

rickyc0912• 13 years ago

Doesn't this require you to follow them first before they can message you? Also how is this different from someone reaching out to you on twitter that you don't follow?

chilldream3• 13 years ago

To the first, it defaults to "anyone on Google+"

To the second, Google+ is unique among social networks in that large swaths of its userbase didn't voluntarily sign up for it.

thrownaway24243• 13 years ago

I like it when Marco quotes Gruber or Gruber quotes Marco. It's like a cyclone of fucknozzlery whipping itself into the perfect pointless storm of impotent mactard rage.

Regarding the feature it seems pretty good. It will definitely help normal people find each other and communicate more and maybe will cut down on people mailing me because they make mistyped or guessed someone else's address.

jaredhansen• 13 years ago

fucknozzlery, mactard

Is this kind of thing really necessary? OK, you don't like them, we get it. But language like this does nothing to elevate the tone of the discussion. Sorry to nitpick on what may well be a valid point (I don't follow either of their writing enough to know), but come on - why not just to be a bit more civil?

thrownaway24243• 13 years ago

This discussion was already beyond redemption. I'm just playing down to its level. If you want to have a serious discussion about this Google product feature, let's start. These two clowns excerpting each others' fact-free rants hasn't started that discussion.

pedalpete• 13 years ago

I was almost upvoting this due to the use of creative language, but you're right. Best not to promote this sort of behaviour before all of HN descents into clever cursing.

balladeer2• 13 years ago

Well, I am new to the (HN) scene here.

I agree the language was uncalled for but I've followed these two (bloggers) in the past. And trust me on this, original commenter (OC) is spot on. These two bloggers (and the elk) unabashedly post in this disgusting manner, all the time - so much that me and many people suspect, from time to time, they are on Apple's payroll. It's like a blind fanaticism, one which doesn't retain even basic logic and self respect. It's not "Apple does right", but they rather like "It's only Apple that does it right". It goes beyond fanboyism.

Maybe OC should have tried harder looking for civilised words to convey his emotions.

Mikeb852• 13 years ago

I personally think the language is fitting, given the language and vitriol in the OP...

krakensden• 13 years ago

I for one enjoyed the coinage. Fucknozzlery is a wonderfully verbal word.

yuhong• 13 years ago

Personally while Google is not perfect, regardless of your opinion on this I think overblowing this distracts from the real problems.

chipotle_coyote• 13 years ago

You can get grumpy about the hyperbolic language, but this defense of Google -- and most others I'm seeing here -- is rather missing what those of us who are increasingly exasperated with Big G are annoyed about. Let's try it without the cursing, shall we?

Google has taken a collection of services that are not functionally related -- a search engine, a mapping engine, a hosted mail service, a social network, a video sharing site, a web-based document editing system with cloud storage, and more -- and made the following unilateral decisions:

(1) The default is to have one Google account that links you to all services. (2) You are strongly encouraged to use your real name for that account. (3) The default for linking services together is opt-out rather than opt-in.

Google puts a lot of effort into making you have one account across all of Google. The signal difference between them and, well, everyone else (with the possible exception of Facebook) is that it's increasingly difficult to not be part of the Google ecosystem. Yes, the median HN reader can come up with a laundry list of other services to replace everything Google, but most users can't and even most technically competent users probably aren't going to.

The upshot of the three principles above is that in practice, anyone with a Google Account -- which is at this point probably a substantial percentage of the world population -- has a very good chance of being able to send email to you if they have no other information but your real name.

Is that the end of privacy as we know it? Of course not. But do you really, really think that only crazy weirdo Apple users would possibly find it just a touch troubling that Google thinks it's okay for this to be the default? Do you really think it's insane for me to think that Google should perhaps consider that their users might deserve privacy from both other Google users and Google itself, as opposed to just the "privacy" granted by better spam blocking algorithms and SSL?

thrownaway24243• 13 years ago

If you already have a Google+ account, which is a requirement to portray yourself as a victim of this feature, it's already possible for anyone else with a Google+ account to annoy you by sharing stuff directly with you, which with the default notification settings in Google+ will cause you to get an email. I don't see how today's feature is worse.

Now, I see the opposite of what you see. Because my gmail address consist of just my name, and my name is common, I _already_ get loads and loads of mail destined for other people with my name. I find this annoying and I have no way to stop it. With this new feature, at least people who are using Gmail to compose their message will have a better chance of finding the right person, because the contacts in the composer show the profile picture from Google+. That means I will get less of this mail. It also means that the mail I do get will go to the "Social" tab of my Gmail inbox, which I don't even display by default, so it will be out of my face entirely. And, finally, I have a way to retaliate, because deleting their messages means those misguided people can never contact me via Google+ again. Nice.

As for your other points I don't think they are even worth addressing. You aren't seriously proposing that Google should maintain separate account systems for Gmail, Google search, Google maps, Google+, Youtube, Docs and Drive, and every other product, are you? Can't you imaging the password maintenance/hijacking/support nightmare that would ensue?

Zigurd2• 13 years ago

I'm not sure there will be bad effects from this. If you know my first name you can find my GMail and Google Apps email addresses (and all my social media profiles, Amazon pages, etc.) Spam is still minimal.

ScotterC• 13 years ago

Apologize for off-topic, but what's wrong with target="_blank" in an anchor?

rickyc0912• 13 years ago

If I had to guess, it would be since no longer w3c standard compliant or it hurts analytics. Probably the latter.

arnemart• 13 years ago

Mostly it's just annoying.

buttsex• 13 years ago

What's so bad about target="_blank"?

john2x• 13 years ago

Some possible reasons:

- "breaks" browser history - obsolete with middle-click, open-in-new-tab - doesn't work well on mobile? - it's a coin toss whether or not the link you're opening will open in a new page or not on mobile

brownbat2• 13 years ago

I'd be more worried, but Google has actively fought against spammers and abuse of their services in the past, and I doubt they've suddenly concluded that user experience doesn't matter.

It might be sensible to at least wait and see how bad the abuse gets before calling Google "sleazy" for opening the doors to massive abuse.

bane3• 13 years ago

This is a silly post (I'm using a less incendiary word than I'm thinking) and is already discussed here in other comments.

Google is clearly relying on their very good anti-spam software and ownership of the socialnetwork to keep your inbox clean from spam.

nhangen7• 13 years ago

I find it funny that on the very same site where we see an endless supply of NSA privacy-invasion complaints, we also see an impressive defense in support of Google's efforts to the same.

Do ya'll hate Marco that much?

chilldream3• 13 years ago

Man, I hate Google+ as much as the next person, and I was this close to defending them here. They almost did it right. Almost.

The problem is that it defaults to "Everyone on Google+" For those of you mystified that this is pissing people off, it's because not everyone on Google+ wanted a Google+ account precisely because Google is shoehorning it into everything! "Just opt out" misses the point; some of us don't want to have to dig around in settings for a service we didn't want to opt out of stuff like being put on a spammable directory for strangers.

If it defaulted to "Circles" I'd have a hard time complaining about it; people who don't want Google+ don't have Circles. But as it stands, this is "we're quietly opting you into spam." (and for those who say it won't happen, I've already gotten more YouTube spam since the G+ rollout than I have over the rest of the account's lifetime combined, and my YouTube account is old)

r00fus• 13 years ago

Tip for those of you who want to limit/remove this feature, it's found in the main settings page (General tab) between "Conversation View" and "Send and Archive".

omonra• 13 years ago

A lot of fury over nothing. If someone is sufficiently bothered to even write a comment in this thread (let alone pen an original genuine article), they can opt-out - since the directions are laid out in the email I received about the news.

Just like we call some problems 'first world problem', I'd call this '15 second annoyance'. Ie the worst case scenario is that you have to spend 15 seconds fixing something - not the end of the world.

I am more bothered (and think there is a level of difference) between this and cases where Google does something you can't opt-out of (such as change Compose window in Gmail or shut down a service). Those are real issues.

Google will make it easy for strangers to email you

Related Stories