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Comment by Stormbringer | Hacker News Reader

It should be the reverse, private should be the default, and public should be the eyebrow raising exception.

How nice it is of Google to decide by fiat to impose their standard on everybody else without consultatin (I know Eric Schmidt is on record as saying that he doesn't believe in privacy, here we have a prime example).

However, at least they are handling this better than the way Facebook does. If this was Facebook they would have (a) just done it without giving advance warning and (b) would have flipped everyone who was private over to public.

At least Google is deleting the accounts rather than outright exposing the info.

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At least Google is deleting the accounts rather than outright exposing the info.

As far as I can tell, they are deleting profiles, not accounts.

"Deleting your public profile won't delete your Google Account." http://www.google.com/support/profiles/bin/answer.py?hl=en&#...

I think the argument here is: if you are going to have a private profile, you may as well simply not have a profile. Like, why did you spend the time to fill in a bunch of details into Google Profile just to mark it "private"?

Perhaps so you could share it explicitly with people you've vetted and trust with your information?

But there is no mechanism to share it explicitly with people you vetted. This isn't Facebook, there aren't friends with various levels of permission and a public version.

You could do that by just showing your screen to your vetted people, though, I suppose.

(a) There are friends with various levels of permission. Certain fields on the profile can be set to be visible only to certain groups of contacts.

(b) Upon noting (a), I filled out a private profile in anticipation that Google would be rolling out further mechanisms to share private profiles with certain contact groups.

World would be a very sad place if everybody were afraid to do anything publicly.

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