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Thought I’d check out Bejeweled Blitz on Google Plus and discovered the permissions it asks for are kind of scary. Popcap gets my email address, a list of people I communicate most often across all of Google (not just G+) as well as my date of birth. This is on top of the usual things like name, location, gender and photo.

They can have my name, gender, photo and location. That’s fine. They’re public anyway. They can’t have my exact Date of Birth. Most of my friends don’t even know my date of birth, nor even my middle name.

Just as importantly, they cannot have my email address associated with this Google account. Even Facebook lets me use an anonymous address proxied through their system instead of my real one. Thats a pretty fundamental issue there. Especially as the platform opens up to a much wider developer base.

G+ Bejeweled Permissions
As the Android Market quite clearly shows, you cannot trust every app developer that develops for your platform. Nor can you truly appraise everything in an app that doesn’t run on your own servers or PC.

To top it off, I find it extremely spooky that rather than giving a list of only those people I interact with solely on Google Plus, they’re getting people I interact with across all Google sites and apps, regardless of whether that person is on Google Plus or not. That includes people that might have privacy concerns of their own about this. The only requirement being that I have added them to a circle. Well, when I signed up for Google Plus, it took all my contacts from Gmail and added them.

Now, this is a problem for me. I like Popcap. I have bought many of their games through Steam. Including popular games like the complete Bejeweled series and Plants vs Zombies. If they didn’t use the Amazon Market, I’d buy their stuff on Android too (Amazon’s App Store only allows people in the US to buy the software.) But I don’t like the idea that they, or any developer that writes a game for release on Google Plus, are suddenly able to access a lot more information about me just so I can play a game when I’m not home. I don’t understand why they want my email address when a game like Crime City doesn’t.

And its really that they can get information about everyone I interact with across the whole of Google’s properties, sites and apps that bothers me. It includes everyone I have added to a circle. Given the people in my circles include people not on Google Plus, and the wording is very specific about and so must include people from Gmail, Google Groups, Google Talk, YouTube, Blogger and more.

How is that a good thing? For me this is the first big issue I have with Google Plus. Fortunately its easy for me to avoid the problem. I simply don’t play games using the site. Problem solved. But its still concerning given how many other people will be playing games and just blindly give permission without checking the request out first.

Or am I being overly concerned of my own private information and my contacts, friends and family?