NY Times article on Google+ mostly a big minus

Last Friday +Claire Cain Miller?  of the New York Times wrote an article on Google+. Claiming among others that Google with Google+ tracks who you are friends with via Gmail and knows your affinities via this social network. Some of these claims are just wrong and some are a misrepresentation of what is actually the case. So I have taken it upon me to do a rebuttal of the claims in this piece. The parts in italics are quotes of the NY Times article. Under them I have placed my questions, rebuttals and explanations.

1.

"Google Plus, the company’s social network, is like a ghost town. Want to see your old roommate’s baby or post your vacation status? Chances are, you’ll use Facebook instead."

This is an old and by now strange claim about the ghosttown. Especially when in the fifth paragraphs it says that Google+ has 540 active million users.

2.

"... a lens that allows the company to peer more broadly into people’s digital life, and to gather an ever-richer trove of the personal information that advertisers covet. Some analysts even say that Google understands more about people’s social activity than Facebook does."

Miller implies here that people at Google (and also Facebook) know on a personal individual level what you are doing. And that they will sell this personal individual information to advertisers. This is simply not true. As in the link in this paragraph becoms clear this is only aggregate information. Not personal information. Any information that is personal will not be shared unless the user gives permission. This is clearly stated in the Privacy Statement by Google. This information is stored and managed on servers by rules defined among others of the Privacy Statement. Only specific Google employees can work with this data and they have to follow strict rules when working with this data.

3.

“Before Google released Plus, the company might not have known that you were the same person when you searched, watched videos and used maps. With a single Plus account, the company can build a database of your affinities."

"The reason is that once you sign up for Plus, it becomes your account for all Google products, from Gmail to YouTube to maps, so Google sees who you are and what you do across its services, even if you never once return to the social network itself.

Emphasis in these quotes is mine. It is correct that Google+ is also an account which gives access to all of Google's services. However it does not know "you were the same person". It is an identifier. And Google does not "see who you are and what you do" or register "your affinities" in a database. It does register of all users with the Google+ identifier how they move along Google services and to other sites. This is nothing special, any website which has a login does this basically. But there are only a few who do it at the same scale as Google. Others are Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo!. But this information is not looked into at a personal individual level by Google. That is pretty much useless.

4.

"“Google Plus gives you the opportunity to be yourself, and gives Google that common understanding of who you are,” said Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product management for Google Plus."

This is really interesting, but what is the use if I do not know the question and context of the question.

5.

"The value of Plus has only increased in the last year, as search advertising, Google’s main source of profits, has slowed. At the same time, advertising based on the kind of information gleaned from what people talk about, do and share online, rather than simply what they search for, has become more important."

The link refers to an article from April 2013 which really does not claim that search advertising for Google has slowed down, but is becoming more challenging. The latest quarter report actually shows that search advertising revenue for Google is still growing. By 17% when comparing the 4th quarters of 2012 and 2013. I won't deny that especially branding advertisers are more and more interested in online statistics.

6.

"Google says Plus has 540 million monthly active users, but almost half do not visit the social network."

Well 300 million are active in stream users as Google calls them. So 240 million do not visit the Google+ social network. Half of 540 is 270, maybe I am splitting hairs here, but there is a difference of 30 million between 240 and 270. It's not the same as the difference between 24 and 27.

7.

"Plus is now so important to Google that the company requires people to sign up to use some Google services, like commenting on YouTube. The push is being done so forcefully that it has alienated some users and raised privacy and antitrust concerns, including at the Federal Trade Commission. Larry Page, Google’s chief executive, tied employee bonuses companywide to its success and appointed Vic Gundotra, a senior Google executive, to lead it."

The article implies that Google+ is important because of advertising. Of course this has partially to do with it. But it is really a project to have people access Google services with one account. Yes, Vic Gundotra was probably specifically hired to do this. Since he had experience with a similar project at Microsoft with Windows Live ID. That people at a company receive bonuses for successful projects is not remarkable in any sense. Which privacy and antitrust cases are referred to here? By my knowledge of the ones I know of none of them were specifically related to Google+. If there were then maybe Miller can share these with us, so we can see for ourselves.

8.

"Thanks to Plus, Google knows about people’s friendships on Gmail, the places they go on maps and how they spend their time on the more than two million websites in Google’s ad network. And it is gathering this information even though relatively few people use Plus as their social network."
More claims without  sources. Also what is relatively few people. According to most numbers Google+ is at least of the same size as twitter or LinkedIn. I would especially like to know where the claim about Gmail comes from. As far as I know this is simply not true. Also the information in maps is gathered for example when using navigation to go somewhere. What sites are visited are registered by Google because of the advertisements that the publishers show on those sites. This was also done before Google+ was in place. All Google+ does is attach one identifier to these actions. But this does not mean that a personal data file is available to buy for advertisers.  Because that is what is implied here. If so, I would like to know who makes such a claim besides the author of this article?

9. "The company has also pushed brands to join Plus, offering a powerful incentive in exchange — prime placement on the right-hand side of search results, with photos and promotional posts."

What is meant by push? This is only a piece of code that a site/company can use when they have a Google+ page and show up as a number one site in the searchresult. It is an incentive yes, but not every company benefits from it. Only those that already have the number one position on certain keywords. And that is not a stable situation. Every company and webmaster can decide for themselves if they want to do this. It requires the creation of a Google+ businesspage, but nothing more than that. So terms like "push" and "powerful incentive" are a bit over the top to say the least.

10.

"The way Google is tying its search engine, which dominates the market, with a less popular product in Plus has set off antitrust concerns. The Federal Trade Commission raised the issue during its recent antitrust investigation of Google, according to two people briefed on the matter.That investigation closed without a finding of wrongdoing."

The mentioned investigation had nothing to do with Google+, this is clear from the link. Since Google+ is not even mentioned in the whole article.

11.

"“If you want Google search, they’re going to shove Google Plus at you pretty hard, so the consumer’s forced to take the product they don’t want to get the product they want,” said Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School who studies antitrust law and the Internet.

“That raises big questions under antitrust law,” he said. “It reminds me a little bit of Microsoft when Microsoft was fearing Netscape and decided to bend over backward and do anything possible to tie Explorer to their operating system.”"

Interesting opinion, but no actual fact of Google doing anything wrong.

12.

Lastly this article has a lot of quotes of which it is not clear for me where they are gathered from. It seems as if Miller interviewed people, but it's not clear. Specifically about that for example Starbucks uses Google+ als for SEO purposes. That's not strange since Google+ public posts in contrast to Facebook and twitter are indexed by Google and other search engines. Furthermore it says that Google has not commented on the issues, but it is not clear what Miller has exactly put forward to the company to comment on.

Ironically, the New York Times also publishes this article on its own Google+ page. It has more than 2 million followers and there are daily posts. I find this rather strange when this same article claims that Google+ is identifying the affinities of users of the NY Times and pushing the use of Google+ on companies. It seems to me as if the newspaper is doing this out of its own volition.

All in all it seems as if too little time was spent on a subject which was not completely understood by the journalist. This resulted in an article implying that Google creates personal files of users and wants to sell them to advertisers. An implied claim which is not substantiated by any sources in this article. A big minus for quality of reporting in this case for the New York Times.