As I have now explained in depth multiple times:

* ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY NO DATA is exchanged between LQ and Google. Perhaps you don't fully understand how web serving works. The G+ button is not served by the LQ web servers, in no way interacts with the LQ web servers and gets no data from LQ. It's not the "LQ g+ icon" it's the "Google g+ icon". Hopefully this clears things up.
* Is anyone else having the account.google.com issue?
* It's disappointing that after running this site completely transparently for almost 15 years that you think I'd be dishonest about something so trivial.

--jeremy

1 members found this post helpful.

To be fair, we don't use "gadgets". We have a single 3rd party G+ button and that's it.

I made no such announcement. In fact, I said we have absolutely no plans to deploy anything additional.

I've already covered this, but I can assure you I have not been dishonest in any way.

Your participation would indeed be missed.

--jeremy

No, you haven't explained the account.google.com issue. Which indicates that data *IS* send.

I might not have a full understanding about the interactions, but a message that, for a short while persistently shows up while visiting LQ (and no other sites loaded) is strange, to say the least.....

Not trivial to me! And my doubt in your honesty is very, very recent (ever since I got that message and the repeated statement about no data being exchanged).

Yes you did! See post 25, last sentence. I'll quote it here, again:If that is not what you meant to say than choose your words more carefully.

Data is exchanged between account.google.com and your browser, yes. LQ is not involved in that in any way and has no access to that data.

--jeremy

However LQ is showing Johannes Linkels. To say there is nothing shared appears, I'm not going to go as far as Druuna, to indicate that youa re not fully aware of what Google is doing. We look at LQ we can see that it has showed jlinkels is Johannes Linkels (and possibly against his will) so there is a privacy issue and there is an issue with regards to LQ showing Google data regardless of who is serving it LQ is showing it.

I'll be checking it through the day.

Do you recognise though that LQ is showing Google data? If you do do you think this is the right thing to do?

I am signed into my Google account but I don't have G+ so no I'm not having this.

Yeah, right. I guess the discussion and my participation ends here.

You seem to be having the same fundamental misunderstanding of how browsers work. LQ is NOT showing Johannes Linkels, Google is. I don't know how else to explain this, but LQ is not serving this data and has no access to this data. It is embedded on an LQ page and therefore appears next to LQ content.

--jeremy

Interesting that for an issue that is so serious to you, you didn't notice that the G+ button has been completely disabled for all LQ members for some time. As I said, I hope you'll continue with the discussion and dialogue as member feedback is and has always been extremely important to us.

--jeremy

Thanks for that last sentence (which was highlighted by me). It is embedded in LQ. Who allowed this? you or Google? Do you think this is right? I don't care if Google or LQ has access to the data I care that it is something that does have privacy implications. We now know jlinkels is Johannes Linkels because of it.

We only know that because it's information he explicitly shared. It's not data that's available to LQ in any way, publicly or privately and is never displayed to anyone except the member in question.

--jeremy

Well the reasoning for having it seems to be flawed then. If it is only showed to the member in question why have it? You aren't going to get more members from that simply because they are already a member. LQ displayed that data to him he didn't explicitly share it, until he opened this topic it seems, with LQ. What is the sense of LQ using someones G+ profile data to show them their own name?

If the individual members is the only one who sees it why does LQ use it for encouraging traffic as you indicate below?

Getting past the data sharing aspect, which I do understand but don't quite agree with but that's a technicality. Lets go back a little hereThe plugin must know otherwise it wouldn't link the two different persona's. If it didn't know we may actually see jlinkels come up as Barrack Obama. The plugin knows because the individual is signed into their account on the same PC/browser they are surfing LQ on. I think that's a privacy issue, yes the user maybe shouldn't be logged into their google account and only check their email while not on LQ but that's not really the point is it. By your own admittance you are using users Google accounts through this plugin to increase traffic.

So much ignorance, so little time. Take your balls and go home, already.

1 members found this post helpful.

Oh come on. Of course the work of embedding it was done by the people who develop LQ.

They did it like this: https://developers.google.com/+/web/+1button/

(Incidentally, who is LQ's web development team?)

The point of the G+ icon is not show you your name, it is an easy way for Google+ users to share a thread to their Google+ account.

It doesn't link persona's, as already explained by Jeremy. It knows from the cookies on your computer to which G+ account you belong, it doesn't know at all about LQ's accounts.
If Barrack Obama had used jilinkels computer to log into his own G+ account, this indeed could happen.
This is not how I would word it. Jeremy has saidWhich I read as: Google uses in its page rank algorithm also data on how many G+ user have linked or liked a specific site. I doubt that Google has an interest on specific users in their page rank algorithm, but that can be up to interpretation.

I'm sure there are many ways to do that.

I don't believe that there is no interaction at all between information LQ has supplied (via cookies or website plugins or any scripts or whatever) and Google has supplied (via the same means). LQ might not access anything (we have to take Jeremy at his word on this) but it appears Google does. If Google didn't it wouldn't know who is who and wouldn't be able to link jlinkels to Johannes Linkels and show the user this.

That would be an interesting experiment. To say that information is not accessed in any way shape or form would indicate that Google would not change what it shows, infact Google wouldn't have a clue and wouldn't show anything. If it shows Obama's name in jlinkel's side pane on a topic post just because Obama has signed into his own G+ account on jlinkel's PC it indicates information is indeed accessed somehow. If this happens it is even more obvious that even though LQ might not access anything Google does. The plugin has to access something to do this and this is how it know who jlinkels is and can show jlinkels who he is.

I trust Jeremy knows what he said, I don't see the need to reword it to make it even more cumbersome.

If the plugin has no intrinsic value to LQ there is no real reason to use it. However the value to LQ, as Jeremy pointed out, of the plugin is it will, in theory, help LQ get more traffic (not through free advertising on G+ pages because the user has shared a topic but through increasing page ranks in search results). It, and the goodwill of LQ members who have G+ pages, is being used to LQ's advantage. Is that a problem? maybe/maybe not, it is up to the individual user to decide if they are happy for their G+ profile to be used for this.