[LINK] "Google's Creepy Social Search"

[rfmcdonald]

PC World's Dan Costa seems both impressed and shocked.

One of my personal favorites is "What scary thing did Google do now?" And Google always delivers. Right on cue, Google released Social Search, which prioritizes results from your friends' Twitter feeds, FriendFeed updates, Facebook pages, LinkedIn profiles, and Picasa libraries. Very cool. And very creepy.

In fairness, Social Search is still in Google Labs, and you have to actively opt-in to the program to participate. I signed up yesterday, but it can take a while for your profile—and those of your friends—to be indexed. Google defines your social circle as your Google contacts, plus anyone that you follow on a social networking service. Again, you have to manually add these to your Google profile, in order to have them to appear in your search results. This isn't going to take anyone by surprise, but it is still a significant shift in the availability of what most people think of, however incorrectly, as private information.

And we're not going to resist, not that we could, mind.

Of course, I can restrict my profile, keep people from tagging photos of me, and try to keep my home address off the Web entirely. Indeed, these measures are all but required for individuals living in a hyper-connected society. But please don't pretend that "surfacing" has no effect. And I am not even going to address what Social Search will mean to the private sector data miners that sell personal profile information, such as your credit history, political affiliation, the number of kids you have, and even what car you drive, to the highest bidder. Suffice it to say, we will have to be a lot more careful about who we follow—and who follows us.