Is Google Becoming Big Brother?

Boston (dbtechno) - The announcement by Google earlier this month that “It thinks it knows your friends,” met with a lot of consternation and anxiety.

The new sharing feature on its new product, Google Reader, allows others that you talk to or have contact through your computer to see what you see. The Google reader has in one of its features a sharing option.

This allows the user to share with certain people posts that you would view online; it shares them with others in a feature of its blog Reader. But it by default allows anyone that you have spoken with in Google Talk to see these posts too.

This has caused quite some alarm.

Google has assumed that if you speak to someone, then they must be your “Friend”. This has allowed this feature in its Google Reader software to share posts that you have read, possibly with people that the user does not want to share with. Google put this feature in without a lot of market or user testing and it is causing a lot of concern among online users.

Can you disable this feature in Google Reader? Yes.

But for those that are not pretty computer savvy, or who do not know it is on by default, others can openly read whatever blogs the user has visited. Sometimes blogs that you have read on a whim, or whose subject matter is such that you might not want everyone on your Google Talk list to read are being routinely read and available.

Google is working to resolve this issue in future editions of Google Reader. However for now, it is best for the user to turn this Reader feature off, unless you want your Aunt Gertrude and everyone on your Google Talk list reading the latest in your blog pursuits.