But, as the Electronic Privacy Information Center pointed out in its brief blog post on the subject, Google is not making it possible for users to opt our of having their information pulled our of other people’s search results — meaning that even if you decide not to look at the personal results yourself, your Google+ contacts can still see information from your account in their personalized results.
What antitrust concerns have been raised? Those raising antitrust concerns are certainly more vocal than the privacy folks, because of the way that the new feature seems to promote Google+ over competing — and more popular — social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.
Twitter has said explicitly that it thinks the new feature is bad for the Web. Google+ content is deeply integrated into the Web and is easier to access and use than any public Facebook and Twitter data. The antitrust argument is that Google is using its dominance in search to unfairly and artificially prop up their less popular social network.
How is this different that Bing’s relationship with Facebook? Social search is definitely not a new thing, and Bing and Facebook have had a similar deal going for months. Facebook data has been incorporated into Bing’s search results, with small notifications telling you when friends have liked certain subjects or have some relevance to your search queries. On its face, this looks like a very similar deal, a search engine and a social network are working together to showcase exclusive data from that network.
There are two main differences between that partnership and SPYW. First, simply put, Microsoft doesn’t own Facebook. Well, not all of it. Microsoft does own a part of the social network, but Facebook is clearly it’s own company, making its own business decisions. Facebook and Google have negotiated over data before, though they never reached an agreement. Blogger John Batelle has
Second, the Facebook integration is opt-in on Bing, meaning that if you’re not interested in having your Facebook account linked to Bing, the search engine will never know anything about your Facebook account or your Facebook friends. From a privacy perspective, that decision makes all the difference.
Related stories:
Google launches personal search tool linked with social media
Google catches heat over social search
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