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NEWS FROM THE LAB - Wednesday, July 6, 2011
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Is this a Google privacy fail? Posted by Sean @ 15:32 GMT

March 2010: my Google Profile was "not yet eligible" to be "featured" in Google's search results. My profile was private and Google was attempting to get me to make it public.

I thought that was a clever use of reverse psychology, so I took a screenshot and posted it to Twitpic.

Your profile is not yet eligible to be featured in Google search results

Today I read that Google will be deleting all private profiles after July 31. This is related to Google+ migration.

Public profiles

So I decided to review my ("private") profile to see if there was anything that I needed to save.

And then I discovered that my profile was no longer private.

Google

Google said that my full name was not being displayed on my profile page.

So I opened another browser to test this out:

Google

It was small comfort that my full name wasn't displayed on my profile, because it – was – displayed under the Buzz tab.

So next, I "unshared" everything that I had shared via Google Reader.

Your shared items

And then, I examined my "Sharing settings".

Sharing settings

My settings were configured to: "Protected (Shared with selected groups)".

Protected? Well it sure seems like it was public to me!

I use Google for search, and not share. And I think I'll keep it that way…

If you haven't reviewed your Google Account settings lately, I highly recommend using Google Dashboard (and soon).

R,
Sean