

Tell HN: new evil invasive service: Google Authorship - jmount

There is a new invasive service called "Google Authorship."  I have seen it take photos from Google+ marked as friends only, combine them with crawled data and then put together a publicly shared dossier that claims the person in question has started a Google Authorship account when they have not.  There seem to be some controls you can try to get at after Google tells your friends you started an authorship account, but by then it is too late.  It is something that tells other people you started an account (so you think that would be opt-in) and it is not even really opt-out (despite  claims, at best you can change annotations, but you can't seem to actually opt-out).
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tokenadult
It sounds like you need to do more investigation of what you are reporting
here. It's not easy to tell if you are observing genuine Google behavior that
you dislike, or spoofed Google behavior that neither you nor Google would
like. I have just signed up for Google Authorship, after being advised by
other people who write all over the Internet and who get plagiarized often
that signing up is a good idea. I have a Google+ profile, which is the usual
way to implement signing up for Google Authorship.

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jmount
I didn't click on the email (risky). I did find Google search results labeled
with Google authorship that I had not signed up for. So that is pretty much
enough investigation. The "sign people up without telling them scam" is an old
one (just saddened Google is stooping to it) and Google isn't an open source
project that needs my donated time in building a bug report for them to
ignore.

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jmount
Still can't tell if the email that informed us was actually from Google or a
phishing attack. The service does exist (was able to find it independent of
the email) and is making false claims.

