Unit Structures Fred Stutzman’s thoughts about information, social networks and technology.

Serious Privacy Issues with Google SearchWiki

David Weinberger highlights a stunning oversight by Google’s SearchWiki team (bold mine):

[T]he results page shows you the nicknames of other users who have voted the page up. So, now the whole world will see that “dweinberger” not only searched for “Angelina Jolie” but thumbs-upped the page of closeups of her tattoos? Guess who just changed his nickname to something less identifiable! This is a feature without value — the list of names isn’t clickable or complete or tell you how many people voted it up — unless you recognize someone’s nickname, in which case it has negative value.

In addition, Google has made a curious decision in requiring all SearchWiki “notes” to be public.  That is, if you want to take advantage of SearchWiki and leave yourself a note, all other SearchWiki members will be able to read it.  This is broken on many levels.  Obviously, there are privacy concerns – you may want to leave a note, but do you really want all other Google users to be able to read it?  And beyond privacy, what about utility.  Let’s say you want to leave yourself a note “To get to the policy page, click on About, and then Policies.”  Since you can only place that note publicly, it will quickly get lost in the sea of other Google users notes.

Considering Google’s zero-day rollout of SearchWiki into their main search property, the lack of HCI and Privacy consideration that went into the product is shocking.  There’s no opt-out.  All comments are forced public.  There’s no way to change your handle.  There’s no way to leave yourself a privacy-enhancing private note. Instead of rolling this feature out fully-baked (opt-in/out, with critical functionality), Google has rolled a half-baked product to all users and forced them through this curious funnel.

Last year Starbucks radically changed its business model by returning the company to its roots.  I don’t know how well that effort has worked, but I liked the concept.  Using the economic downturn as an excuse, perhaps its time for Google to do the same?

[...] Fred Stutzman agrees, also pointing out that Google has made a curious decision in requiring all SearchWiki “notes” to be public. [...]

Well said.

Today, when I went to vote on a search results, I was presented a warning screen noting that my actions will be attributed to my account name and viewable by others. This warning doesn’t appear in the video Google originally released showing how to use the product. Has this been added subsequent to the original launch?

I went to try this after reading your post. Google asked me if I wanted to turn this function on and did specifically let me know that my nickname would be public. Was that not there yesterday? I still think it’s pretty sucky, but differently from the way I was expecting.

They seem to be doing quite a bit of live tweaking to SearchWiki. The comments are now hidden until you click on them, which reduces the graffiti aspect a little. The “Learn More” link is also new, I think.

Re: leaving notes for yourself there is a “see all my SearchWiki notes” option (which may also be new). All of your notes are still public, though.

I find it really surprising that none of these problems were flagged in all of their “bucket testing” and other usability testing.

[...] I posted about a few of the serious privacy flaws in Google’s SearchWiki.  Thankfully, there seems to [...]