I’ve blocked and unfollowed Friend A and Friend B. Friend A has blocked and unfollowed me. I can still see who Friend A is following — not just the people she’s following who have public profiles, but also Friend B, who does not have a public profile. Buzz helpfully tells me that Friend A is following Full Name at username@gmail.com, who doesn’t have a public profile.

In short, Friend B’s name and email address are still available, despite the fact that she has not made them public, through Friend A’s profile, to someone (me) that Friend A has blocked.

I wrote a letter.

It’s tricky, even for people who know a lot about how the web ticks to understand the implications of ticking, or not ticking, some obscure checkbox on some website or other.

You’ll need to at a minimum, read the agreements, and be able to understand them. Most privacy-agreements are in a form that make them damn-near incomprehensible to a large fraction of the population, hell some of them are incomprehensible even to people who -have- law-degrees.

Simplified, standards would be a huge advantage. Infact I’ve quoted that as one of the advantages of free software in a different context. If you know what “GPL” or “BSD” means, you don’t have to spend hours and effort analyzing the new eula. Not that anyone ever does anyway, 9 out of 10 click “I agree” without even scrolling to the bottom of the document. (some installers force people to scroll, but people still generally do not read)

The weird thing about understanding is that you don’t always know when you’re misunderstanding something. The folks we’re discussing and discussing with here are the ones who grasp the technology of blogging, emails and online identity enough that they can piece the puzzle together — and even then sometimes not quick enough.

What about the folks who are not that savvy? What hope do they have?

There are a number of reasons for this.

1) Nothing gets downloaded onto my computer ever unless I’ve looked at it and know that it isn’t spam, let alone a virus;

2) I can’t control whether other people have it in their contacts list, and G-d knows my crazy nasty abusive ex has it, but he seems to have lost interest in going out of his way to bother me; but there are no apps that can get into it the way they can Gmail or Yahoo or Hotmail to decide that everyone I’ve ever exchanged mail with is my friend, buddy and pal.

I also highly advise NOT linking AIM, YM and MSN messenger usernames up with facebook and other such services, or using one that you never use–I have a “public” AIM that I check maybe twice a year, and multiple other SNs for different groups I belong to, and one for my intimate friends. They do the same thing with these that they do with email.

It’s bad enough that I have one friend on Facebook who is still in a religious group I wish I could forget I was ever in, and Facebook keeps showing these people how to find me online.

First time I logged in, it showed me a big window with the people it suggested, and asked me to manually confirm. It’s still somewhat risky, but it’s atleast one step better than doing it fully automatically. (many enough people “confirm” all sorts of things without even reading it trough)

Also, the auto-thing, where it suggest people you communicate with often, doesn’t trigger if you only RECEIVE a lot of email from a certain address, it only considers it frequent communication if you also SEND a lot of email to some address.

I’m not saying it’s good. It’s definitely a risk. I’m just saying that it -does- seem they’ve taken *some* precautions (even though probably not enough)

Awesome, google, thanks for that. Make sure when you are turning it off that you delete all your public buzz and your profile info as well.