why google does it and the infinite accounts issue [LWN.net]

why google does it and the infinite accounts issue

Posted Aug 10, 2006 19:27 UTC (Thu) by berntsen (guest, #4650)
In reply to: Google's project hosting service by mmarsh
Parent article: Google's project hosting service

First, I believe I know why google makes all these efforts that require you to have google or gmail account: personalised data.

If you decide to use one of their many nice services, you will have to get an account which will most likely create you a cookie that will follow you for all their services, including searching. Now they will know a lot about you and can make better services for you, because they know what you want (at least they ought to be able to make an educated guess). Knowing a lot about you will make it more difficult for newcommers to compete, since they do not have the amount of data making up the difference when attempting to produce _personally relevant_ services.

I came to this conclusion reading the oreilynet article on web 2.0: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/...

I may be wrong about what they do technically with cookies (as I haven't bothered to investigate), but I still believe very much that their drive is to gather data about users to let them make better services (and this way make more nice money :)

Second, as most of us, I am tired of the infinite number of accounts you are required to make, in order to 'participate' on sites on the web. I stumbled upon the proposal, openid, http://www.openid.net/ while reading blogs on planetrdf, and it seems a neat solution to me. Someone has voiced security concerns (of course), but the idea _is_ very neat I think.

Happy computing,
/\/ikolaj (blog.efef.dk)

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why google does it and the infinite accounts issue

Posted Aug 14, 2006 23:28 UTC (Mon) by gstein (guest, #3612) [Link]

Euh... no. We have very specific rules against that. For example: we were accidentally logging some user IDs in our Subversion logs, and had to go fix some code to eliminate that. (yes, we have a team that specifically reviews what gets logged, and ensures that information that might identify a person is *NOT* logged).

We require a person to sign in with a "verified" Google Account. That means we know the person (at some point in time) could receive email there. That ensures that the Owners/Members of the project can contact the person filing the bug report.

Spam bug reports and spam comments are a serious pain. And even more so for a site in the "google.com" domain. Over time, might we find other ways to fix this? Possibly. But we have so many other interesting ideas and features to bring to users and developers, that tackling the problem is very low on our list.

why google does it and the infinite accounts issue

Posted Aug 15, 2006 9:09 UTC (Tue) by berntsen (guest, #4650) [Link]

I assume you are affiliated with google, and if so I appreciate your response.

But I think you misunderstand me a bit. When I say personalised I do not mean that you find out which person is behind a user id (a cookie) and provide better services because you know the 'person' (by looking at interests on the persons home page, e.g).

What I mean is, e.g., that if a person searches a lot for java and always follows the coffee links rather than the programming language links, you will alter the rating for the cookie such that coffee related java links will appear on top. Likewise you will present him coffee related ads rather than programmning related ads.

Of course I can think paranoid thoughts (in these days where conspiracy theories bloom in the cinemas) that Google has research teams writing algorithms to automatically find the person behind any cookie, and that NSA or whatever has full access to your logs and uses it for whatever, ;-) But that was not my point at all.

Happy happy,
/\/ikolaj