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by willifred 5494 days ago
Gmail has started suggesting friends to 'consider including' on emails. Personally, this has resulted in both me and my ex getting some very uncomfortable suggestions recently for whom to consider including in correspondence. It hasn't suggested we email each other, which would be forgivable, but a third party whom I had never directly emailed. And it highlighted for me what I consider to be a major problem with Google's social initiatives, which is that they've collected and employed this 'social' data in a completely antisocial way--behind your back, when you're using unrelated services. And it might be clever, but it can get very creepy.
2 comments

And this is one of the pitfalls of testing things internally at a company like Google.

There are a lot of important use cases in social networks around "me and my recent ex", but within a corporation you'll be unlikely to run into them. (Similar issues caused a lot of complaints for Google buzz.)

They're chasing taillights. You know what Google and Facebook have in common? They both worry about Facebook.
I don't think the suggested recipients feature pulls from other users' contacts. You, your ex, and the third party have probably been recipients of the same message in the past.