
Google will make it easy for strangers to email you - jfb
http://www.marco.org/2014/01/09/more-google-sleaze
======
Sargos
I don't understand why this is such a bad thing. Email is not really a private
network. Anyone can send you email at any time just like they could send you a
letter without your permission. Requiring this to be opt-in seems a bit crazy
to me.

This just makes communication with people you already have a sort-of
relationship with easier. Seems like an all around good thing. If you really,
really feel like only a whitelist of people should ever contact you then you
can always go into the options and turn it off. But why would you?

~~~
usea
A minor nitpick: the default setting is "Anyone on Google+" so they don't have
to have any relationship with you at all.

~~~
statictype
Does anyone on Google+ currently need to have a relationship with you to send
you email?

~~~
hobs
They do need to know my email address, which isnt publicly available. They can
add me on google+, which I dont care about, I do however care about anyone who
can sign up an account sending me annoying emails.

------
andylei
> anyone on its social network will be able to send messages to your Gmail
> inbox.

i don't get it. isn't that how email works? what people are currently not
allowed to send messages to my gmail inbox?

~~~
jaredsohn
The difference is that you don't need to know what the person's email address
is.

On Facebook, you can send a message to anyone from their profile, but it shows
up within Facebook rather than the person's e-mail client (and it shows up in
'other' too.)

Edit: Facebook did not email me the last time I received something in my Other
inbox (but that was a couple of years ago); perhaps that has changed?

Edit2: Being able to send a Google+ message from your e-mail client is a nice
convenience that takes advantage of the fact that Google owns both properties.
(It would be nice if it also provided a lookup for Facebook users.) I think
that is all that this is, which means there is no controversy. I imagine you
could already write someone a message that shows up in their email without
knowing what their email address is by messaging them within Google+. If that
is the case, this change is purely an added convenience that doesn't impact
spamming at all.

~~~
jere
>The difference is that you don't need to know what the person's email address
is.

And that prevents what exactly... people _sending you email_? I don't get it.

~~~
jerf
Email has a light-weight de facto security system where people can't send you
an email without knowing your address. _Obviously_ , this isn't perfect, and
it was never truly a security feature, but, nevertheless, it is there, and for
all of its manifold and obvious faults, it _mostly_ works this way. People are
used to this. Taking it away will bother people.

------
chaz
If Google built this as "people can send you messages on Google+," and you get
a notification in G+, wouldn't that be perfectly normal for a social network?
And in addition to that notification, you get an email, saying that "John
Smith has sent you a message on Google+," isn't that pretty normal as well?
Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all do this by default.

I don't think it's that much different if the from: tag is changed from
"Google+ Notifications" to "John Smith" and the subject is changed
accordingly. The in-Gmail treatment looks reasonable to me, based on Google's
blog post. [edited for clarity]

~~~
jfb
I mean, I don't use Gmail, or G+, but isn't innovation in messaging a good
thing? Mail needs a good rethink, and yeah, maybe I'd prefer it to be by
someone other than Google, but I have a hard time seeing malicious intent
here.

------
logn
By the time Google wins the social network war, it probably won't even be
worth winning. The social network will be like usenet of last generation.
Meanwhile they'll have succeeded in upsetting all the power users and uber
geeks, who are the people lending credibility to their brand. And I certainly
don't see the Snapchat generation coming along for the Google+ ride either.

~~~
joelrunyon
This is really interesting.

Google seems deadset on catching up to facebook, but facebook is already
trying to catchup to snapchat & the next wave of "social" \- which seems
decidedly more private.

It's almost as if by trying to catchup to FB - google is only falling further
behind.

------
thrownaway2424
I like it when Marco quotes Gruber or Gruber quotes Marco. It's like a cyclone
of fucknozzlery whipping itself into the perfect pointless storm of impotent
mactard rage.

Regarding the feature it seems pretty good. It will definitely help normal
people find each other and communicate more and maybe will cut down on people
mailing me because they make mistyped or guessed someone else's address.

~~~
jaredhansen
> fucknozzlery, mactard

Is this kind of thing really necessary? OK, you don't like them, we get it.
But language like this does nothing to elevate the tone of the discussion.
Sorry to nitpick on what may well be a valid point (I don't follow either of
their writing enough to know), but come on - why not just to be a bit more
civil?

~~~
balladeer
Well, I am new to the (HN) scene here.

I agree the language was uncalled for but I've followed these two (bloggers)
in the past. And trust me on this, original commenter (OC) is spot on. These
two bloggers (and the elk) unabashedly post in this disgusting manner, all the
time - so much that me and many people suspect, from time to time, they are on
Apple's payroll. It's like a blind fanaticism, one which doesn't retain even
basic logic and self respect. It's not _" Apple does right"_, but they rather
like _" It's only Apple that does it right"_. It goes beyond fanboyism.

Maybe OC should have tried harder looking for _civilised_ words to convey his
emotions.

~~~
jonhendry
"unabashedly post in this disgusting manner,"

What, "mildly critical of Google"?

Dude, get some perspective. Are you 12?

~~~
balladeer
Enjoy your day. Life is short.

------
statictype
marco.org (which shows ads - don't worry, I removed it for you) writes:

 _You’re just eyeballs. Body parts and ad-targeting data. Google doesn’t care
about you at all. You’ve tolerated enough already that it’s pretty clear
you’re not really going anywhere._

Couldn't you say the same about _any_ company? Say, developers and Apple?

 _You 're just dollar signs and app figures. Apple doesn't care about you at
all. You've tolerated enough already that it's pretty clear you're not really
going anywhere._

~~~
smegel
Google promised to not be evil.

~~~
officemonkey
Please, if Corporations truly are people, then they're psychopaths.
Corporations will do whatever it takes to make a buck. Expecting them to have
a moral center is like expecting a shark to do calculus.

------
jfb
I actually don't understand the sound and fury over this; it seems perfectly
reasonable to me.

------
cjensen
Marco is a bit too vitriolic about this, but I think the main point stands:
Letting _anybody_ email you, even if you have tried to keep your email address
private, is a pretty stupid idea. It should default to opt-in or possibly
default to allowing your G+ contacts to mail you.

~~~
csallen
What, exactly, makes it stupid? Worst-case scenario: a few people email you,
you get annoyed, delete their emails, and opt-out. Am I missing something?

~~~
hobs
The part where you opt-in.

~~~
csallen
The point of my comment is that it's perfectly fine without opt-in.

~~~
hobs
I understand that, and it is perfectly fine to have that opinion, you just may
find that many disagree with that opinion.

~~~
csallen
More specifically, the point of my comment was to give several reasons why
opt-out was okay, and in return I was hoping to get a contradictory
perspective providing reasons why it's _not_ okay.

A discussion that never goes beyond "I (dis)agree" isn't much of a discussion.

~~~
hobs
Sounds fair enough. Though in my defense opt out isnt just "I disagree", its I
disagree because of the method by which I am automatically signed up for an
additional feature which I disagree with.

1\. This was not a feature that I originally signed up for, and increases the
possibility of irritating/trivial items to be sent to me, I have a spam filter
for things like this and in general would rather not mark google as spam, they
send me a good number of other things which I do find useful (which seems to
be an abuse of the "trust" however thin that I have with them).

2\. My private email is perceived as somewhat sacrosanct even though it is an
obvious federated system. A somewhat apt analogy is my home address, while
some people could definitely find it through various means and communication
happens all the time by parties I do not want to send me mail, I do not give
it nor do I invite strangers to approach it, and I especially dont like it
when a friend of a friend gives out my address to strangers.

3\. In general, opt-out features of social networks are by design an anti-
feature meant to drive more engagement for them, and has little to no
perceived benefit to me. (Yes you can say facebook does it, and that is why I
dont have a facebook account)

Better?

------
chilldream
Man, I hate Google+ as much as the next person, and I was _this close_ to
defending them here. They almost did it right. Almost.

The problem is that it defaults to "Everyone on Google+" For those of you
mystified that this is pissing people off, it's because not everyone on
Google+ wanted a Google+ account precisely because Google is shoehorning it
into everything! "Just opt out" misses the point; some of us don't want to
have to dig around in settings for a service we didn't want to opt out of
stuff like being put on a spammable directory for strangers.

If it defaulted to "Circles" I'd have a hard time complaining about it; people
who don't want Google+ don't have Circles. But as it stands, this is "we're
quietly opting you into spam." (and for those who say it won't happen, I've
_already_ gotten more YouTube spam since the G+ rollout than I have over the
rest of the account's lifetime combined, and my YouTube account is old)

------
damian2000
Isn't this the same as Twitter emailing you the contents of a DM everytime
someone DMs you? Because the person sending the mail doesn't actually see your
email address, only your username.

~~~
interpol_p
It's a little different, though not in practice. It's more a difference of
semantics.

On Facebook / Twitter you are receiving a notification through their service,
and then their service is emailing you about said notification (likely with
the contents of the message).

With this it maps your email address to your public Google+ name, and auto-
fills your name for anyone who wishes to contact you through Gmail, which
appears as a regular email client. You receive the email as a normal email (as
far as I'm aware, may be not the case).

I suspect a lot of the anger stems from this subtle distinction. With Facebook
and Twitter, when you sign up for the account you also sign up for the
relevant notifications. With this Gmail feature, many people did not sign up
for their public G+ name to be mapped to their email address, your name auto-
completing in other peoples' "To:" fields.

That said, I don't really have an issue with this feature because I don't have
a G+ account, and if I did have a G+ account I'd probably find it pretty
useful.

------
wmf
You can already share a G+ post with a specific person and it will create a
notification on the Google bar; is this so much worse?

~~~
fpgeek
And generate a notification email unless you've gone and disabled that...

------
JosephHatfield
Agree that this should be opt-in only. Google may believe that people wouldn't
use the feature if they had to go to the trouble of enabling it. BTW, it
appears that this feature cannot be used to spam others. If you receive such
an email and simply delete it, the sender will not be able to send you any
more messages. That is, Google only lets senders continue to email you only if
you respond to the first message.

~~~
ghaff
Personally, I don't care. I can imagine scenarios though where someone has a
huge following on social media but wants to keep their email private to a
relatively small circle. This may be an edge case but nonetheless it probably
exists.

~~~
JosephHatfield
Understood. Note that, apparently, if you DO respond to one of these messages,
the original sender is actually provided with your email address. Here's the
text of a message I just received from Google:

"How it works with email addresses

Emailing Google+ connections works a bit differently to protect the privacy of
email addresses. Your email address isn't visible to your Google+ connections
until you send them an email, and their email addresses are not visible to you
until they respond. "

------
IBM
This is the type of thing that the X Labs projects are meant to distract from.
Google is a company that has decided to flip the switch and monetize
everything they possibly can, and are attempting to remain relevant and
perceived as innovative in the eyes of its various stakeholders: employees,
shareholders, tech press, the general public, regulators, etc. They are the
new Microsoft, but they still want you to view them as the Google when it was
first going public.

------
nhangen
I totally get this. My gmail address is a treasure, and I treat it as such. I
hand it out to people that I'm OK getting emails from. Everyone else gets a
work email or a misc email that I check less often.

Beyond that, since Google uses emails for login, this essentially gives
someone half of the equation to hack your account.

It also enables spammers to quickly collect legit emails for their spam lists.

~~~
darren_
This feature doesn't reveal your email address unless you reply. And the
message goes to the 'social' tab if you're using the tabbed inbox (it'll
probably be easy to filter if you're not, but I have no idea)

I really doubt spammers are going to find these useful for harvesting.

~~~
nhangen
You're right, just found this:

"Your email address isn't visible to your Google+ connections until you send
them an email, and their email addresses are not visible to you until they
respond."

Doesn't change my opinion on the 'feature,' but does make it less painful. I
wonder if the backlash in this thread has more to do with people's distaste
for Marco than it does with the issue at hand.

------
omonra
A lot of fury over nothing. If someone is sufficiently bothered to even write
a comment in this thread (let alone pen an original genuine article), they can
opt-out - since the directions are laid out in the email I received about the
news.

Just like we call some problems 'first world problem', I'd call this '15
second annoyance'. Ie the worst case scenario is that you have to spend 15
seconds fixing something - not the end of the world.

I am more bothered (and think there is a level of difference) between this and
cases where Google does something you can't opt-out of (such as change Compose
window in Gmail or shut down a service). Those are _real_ issues.

------
nhangen
I find it funny that on the very same site where we see an endless supply of
NSA privacy-invasion complaints, we also see an impressive defense in support
of Google's efforts to the same.

Do ya'll hate Marco that much?

------
locusm
"Emailing Google+ connections also takes advantage of Gmail's new inbox's
categories."

This seems broken for me, I have to delete both unwanted emails from my inbox
in addition to the category, even though I dont use the categories feature per
se.

------
dannyrosen
Today is Christmas for the recruiting industry

------
izzydata
I already get no emails and I doubt that will change. If some people I put on
my google+ send me some emails then I'll welcome that. I wouldn't have put
spam bots in my circles in the first place.

~~~
hobs
The default is they do not need to be in your circles.

------
rickyc091
Doesn't this require you to follow them first before they can message you?
Also how is this different from someone reaching out to you on twitter that
you don't follow?

~~~
chilldream
To the first, it defaults to "anyone on Google+"

To the second, Google+ is unique among social networks in that large swaths of
its userbase didn't voluntarily sign up for it.

------
brownbat
I'd be more worried, but Google has actively fought against spammers and abuse
of their services in the past, and I doubt they've suddenly concluded that
user experience doesn't matter.

It might be sensible to at least wait and see how bad the abuse gets before
calling Google "sleazy" for opening the doors to massive abuse.

------
bane
This is a silly post (I'm using a less incendiary word than I'm thinking) and
is already discussed here in other comments.

Google is clearly relying on their very good anti-spam software and ownership
of the socialnetwork to keep your inbox clean from spam.

------
ScotterC
Apologize for off-topic, but what's wrong with target="_blank" in an anchor?

~~~
rickyc091
If I had to guess, it would be since no longer w3c standard compliant or it
hurts analytics. Probably the latter.

~~~
arnemart
Mostly it's just annoying.

------
greenwalls
There is always the option to delete your G+ account, yet keep Gmail.
[http://www.wikihow.com/Delete-a-
Google%2B-Account](http://www.wikihow.com/Delete-a-Google%2B-Account)

------
Zigurd
I'm not sure there will be bad effects from this. If you know my first name
you can find my GMail and Google Apps email addresses (and all my social media
profiles, Amazon pages, etc.) Spam is still minimal.

------
r00fus
Tip for those of you who want to limit/remove this _feature_ , it's found in
the main settings page (General tab) between "Conversation View" and "Send and
Archive".

------
obtino
The whole Google+ integration is pathetic! I don't want to be able to "chat"
to anyone following me from "Hangouts". The whole concept is a pile of dung!

------
buttsex
What's so bad about target="_blank"?

~~~
john2x
Some possible reasons:

\- "breaks" browser history \- obsolete with middle-click, open-in-new-tab \-
doesn't work well on mobile? \- it's a coin toss whether or not the link
you're opening will open in a new page or not on mobile

------
mml
I feel bad for John Smith.

