Now that Google+ has finally gone live for Google Apps customers, it’s important to note what may be a dealbreaker for some on the privacy front.
If you’re a user of Google+ with a corporate or education Google Apps account, your administrator can access and modify your Google+ account and its postings. This information is pointed out in a Google help center topic related to the new feature:
Because you’re signing up for Google+ with your corporate email address, your Google Apps administrator retains the right to access your Google+ data and modify or delete it at any time.
This notice is also applied to Google Apps for Education customers.
The fact that an administrator has access to your accounts under Google Apps is nothing new, but this is the first time that Google has had a social network among its Apps offerings, so the privacy implications are a bit more severe.
To understand the concept, imagine if your boss were able to access all of your photo albums, posts and conversations on Facebook? Would you be concerned?
At the very least, it seems like this aspect of Google+ for Google Apps would require some attention by corporate policy makers that explains it to employees.
It seems like this positions Google+ for Apps as a purely ‘business-based social network’. This would imply that you should have two different Google+ accounts, one for business and one for your personal life, which seems clunky.
Google does mention that you can export your data if you’d like to transfer it out to a personal account at some point, but it does seem problematic if you’ve been let go or fired and no longer have access to your email account suddenly.
Users can export or transfer their Google+ data using services such as Google Takeout at any time, even if you’ve disabled Google+ for their accounts. This data includes profiles, streams, circles, contacts, and photos.”
Clearly there are some idiosyncrasies about the way that Google+ for Google Apps works, you should probably consider the implications before firing up an account under your corporate account.
Being an administrator myself I have to say it is a good thing we get to admin G+ profiles. My biggest concern is that some one will use a company email address such as customer.services (which IS searchable on Google) to post naked pictures of themselves drunk like they do on their fb profile or post random ramblings about how they think some one is hot.
My motto is: If you want a personal space do it in your own time not the companies
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Likeif google is planning to use G+ for Gapp as a "business-based social network" , they have to let us swing easly from an account to another
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LikeAdleine I'd assume account switching would still work. It would have to.
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fanf … same goes for email, calendar, Docs etc. Would be sort of surprising if admins did *not* have this access, no?
fanf (a) That's made very clear on the sign-up screen, (b) what would you expect?
fanf And you have unrestricted access to all your users' data too...
wmijn thenextweb de beste van alle redenen om dat hele Google + niet te gebruiken!
baekdal they are revamping google maps also
http://t.co/a165F4n6
TheRomit This should be mentioned in red fonts on top of log- in page !!
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again
Yikes!
Many of us already did the switch years ago when Google forced Youtube accounts to gmails, and my client had to give up his email because of this.