Comments on: Google Chat

By: mohsen koleini

mohsen koleini — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 17:29:13 +0000

dear m/s
I am grateful to inform you that I am a persian viewer.I would like to appreciate your contributions toward helping farsi speakers find their country’s literature through your library.
regards
m.k.

By: caleb tr

caleb tr — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 02:17:10 +0000

Agreed, opt-in would be better. On the whole, it’s not so different from browsers not making us opt-in before we send websites referring URLs.

There is an implicit contract with every site we visit that they will record our IP address, what pages we visit, search terms, cookies, useragent, referring url and whatever else they can.

Google made it all explicit by putting ads on search pages and gmail - what we type earns them money, and we all get to use Google in exchange.

It’s great to see an awareness of privacy issues in chat starting to grow (slowly, as evidenced by your survey).

By: Administrator

Administrator — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 19:44:28 +0000

But again — you have to take action to make this happen. I took a simple poll around the office of users that use Gmail (unscientific — only 9 users) and the chat feature. Do you know how many knew that their chats were logged? 1 — and that was me. So while Google does provide the features to make chat’s private — does this make it ok that users must discover this feature themselves or read the lengthy EULA to see that their conversations really might not be as private as they might believe.? I don’t think so.

–Terry

By: caleb tr

caleb tr — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 19:31:05 +0000

Terry, I agree that Google shouldn’t assume that we want to save transcripts by default, but in other areas, they are on the privacy vangaurd. Their “off the record” feature allows chatters to prevent their transcript from being saved in anyone’s account.

Google is the first commercial chat provider, so far as I know, to say “we don’t need your data”, and that’s huge.

http://www.google.com/talk/chathistory.html

Caleb