Great rant from a Google employee on G+

[kallistixf]

Steve Yegge of Google wrote an excellent rant on G+'s issue.  He's since taken it down, but copies are available -- for example on Hacker News.  Worth reading.

What's interesting is that he intended it for internal use, but instead posted it publicly.  Oops.   Yet another great example of how Circles don't necessarily solve all privacy problems. 
 

Comments

[puzzlement]

It does support your point though. Google feels that Googlers-speaking-about-Google-things should be strongly separated from their Googlers-speaking-about-stuff-with-their-friends. And this is perfectly correct! Otherwise it's impossible to have a frank discussion about their work given trade secrets and public company information laws and similar things, and just generally not wanting to have their internal fights watched by the whole world.

Admittedly, in the case of a company, even if Google themselves didn't think this, most likely it would be viewed very dubiously by their partner companies and so on to take the risk of allowing potentially extremely sensitive information (financials, contracts, unannounced products) being discussed on a public site that could be hacked, even if no Googler ever slipped up and used the wrong circle. (No insider information here, but I would guess that Google's own G+ would be stored in separate databases, on web servers that only face their intranet, etc, because that's just how it needs to be done in order to observe standard precautions for discussing corporate business.)

Anyway, given that this separation of work and other identity is so well established within Google (and within corporate culture generally) it seems very obvious to take the next step of agreeing that other parts of one's identity might be segmented too!

[kallistixf]

Very true. When I do have multiple accounts on a site I use different browsers and (where possible) different color schemes and fonts to give myself cues about where I am ... but at Google they probably use Chrome for everything.

[puzzlement]

It would make sense for Google to make sure it is styled differently at this point, if they haven't already, I suppose. They seem to have decided that Yegge's post is basically recruitment material ("look at our robust internal debate") but it seems from eg In the Plex (and just plain old SEC regulations) that if he'd leaked financials that way it would have gone badly for him.