Science Library Pad

Facebook relationship management vs Google+ reputation management

In thinking more about the different ways in which we share online, it occured to me there is another way to describe the difference between the personal and the professional.

The personal is about relationships, various types of interpersonal connections.  Managing relationships often requires things not said, or things said to one group but not to another, for reasons of etiquette, diplomacy, human nature etc.  Managing relationships thus has as a primary component the management of privacy, the management of who can hear what you say about what topics and what people.  This is the Facebook Friends List model and the Google+ Circles model.  It's as much about who doesn't (in theory) hear what you say as about who does.  When Mark Zuckerberg says (in my understanding) that we basically shouldn't have privacy, that it is somehow dishonest to have different things we share with different people, I think he's talking about a model of human interaction quite different from the one we are used to.  He's basically talking about The Invention of Lying world, a world where everyone tells the absolute truth to everyone in public and in private, all the time.  This world is funny to us because it is so cruel, there are no social graces.  I don't think it would be a better world in terms of interpersonal relationships.  Does everyone really want to hear all their faults announced?

This type of interaction is quite different from the reputation management of a professional life.  Reputation is about visibility, reputation requires a public presence.  Professional interactions that are not confidential thus benefit from being as open as possible.  If I want to build my reputation online, the best way is to share as broadly as possible my knowledge and my interests.  In general then, reputation is not about limited who can read your thoughts or see your links.  It may have an aspect of managing the channels so that you reach the maximum number of interested people, but it doesn't benefit from private sharing in the way that relationship management does.

Therefore I think the Google+ circles model is ill-suited for professional interactions, instead you benefit from just setting everything to Public... in which case you might as well use Twitter and a blog.  There will be lots of people of course who will use G+ as a blog replacement, but this has a downside: you lose control of your own information, at least from the standpoint of Internet presence and statistics.  In effect it's like Knol, where you were supposed to put all your expertise on Google's site, to boost Google's search rankings.  For Twitter it's the standard for brief sharing, but that doesn't have a big reputation impact.  However for long-form writing (like this blog post) I would much rather have the "home" be a site under my control, where I can manage the design and analyse the stats, rather than giving my content to Google to live under an inscrutable URL - mine is http://plus.google.com/117260312446321547979 - in effect making Google itself not just the discovery channel, but the content channel, the reputation channel for my professional life.  I can see how that has huge benefits for Google, but to me it seems like a lot of control to give up. 

Right now I think we already have some well-defined channels:

* Facebook - mostly for personal (relationship) interactions and sharing of billions of photos (often with various privacy rights applied)

* Twitter - mostly for link sharing and short q&a type interactions - mostly professional reputation for those who use it for work sharing

* Flickr - photo hosting

* Tumblr - photo resharing

* blogs - long-form ideas, building reputation in a certain field or area

* discussion groups - places where people can gather together around a particular topic or specialisation

I can certainly see that Google+ can attack on multiple fronts: photo hosting & resharing (but Picasa Web has been around for a long time already with minimal impact), "blog" hosting (but with many fewer features than a full-blown blogging platform, and loss of the unique reputation you can build around a customised blog).  However what I see mainly is multiple gaps: there's no group functionality (although an improved, less-email-centric Google Groups could fix this), there's no way to filter content inbound (so that you could read topics, not people) and there's no way to share content outbound (so that you could e.g. feed anything you hashtag with #opendata on Twitter to a certain circle or circle discussion group).

Right now, Google+ looks like a direct Facebook replacement, relationship management, privacy (really pseudo-privacy) management tool.  It will take quite a bit of evolution if they want it to be a professional tool.

G+ Circles: pseudo-control over your push channels

G+ at least gives us lots of opportunities to talk about G+.

Summary

Google+ Circles don't come anywhere near modelling the complexity of our online interactions.

Details

One of the main topics is Circles, which people seem to have difficulty thinking through - either in creating them or understanding how they work.

This interest in circles is a bit surprising because Facebook has had Friend Lists (which are basically the exact same thing is circles) for a long time but almost no one talks about using Friend Lists.

So I have to give Google kudos for drawing attention to this type of feature, although I'm a bit puzzled why it gets so much attention since Facebook is the same, even to the extent of a per-post pulldown at the bottom where you can select the lists that will see your Facebook post.

Facebook is actually placing more emphasis on Groups now, perhaps because G+ doesn't have groups (yet anyway).

It's important to understand that Circles & Friend Lists are filtering-at-source, outbound filtering, content "channel" preselection.  There are two common scenarios for outbound pre-filtering:

1) The "NOT" scenario for personal content, e.g. I want my friends to see this picture but I do NOT want my family seeing it

2) The "I want to signal a topic, content type or urgency" scenario, e.g. I will put these photos in the Ottawa buildings group

First, it's important to understand the "NOT" scenario is a fantasy, it's pseudo-control over your content.  Basically as long as the content exists in some recorded, viewable (or hearable) format somewhere, it can be made public.  If you want private, I suggest spy-type park bench conversations with a noise screen and check your companion for a wire first.  Other than that there is no private.  There's only pseudo-private.

So for example you can push content into your "Super Top Secret" Circle with "sharing disabled" on the post, but anyone in that circle can just copy and paste or screen capture or take a photo of the screen or any of dozens of other methods of duplicating recorded content (some more work than others). 

(As a side note, this is why DRM is a fantasy, which doesn't stop attempts such as Microsoft's Information Rights Management.)

So putting your content anywhere, whether it be in an SMS, an email, a Facebook posting... you should expect it could become public at any time.  This is why I would suggest against say, creating two Google+ Circles called "Circle where I pretend I love (task)" and "Circle where I tell people I trust that I actually hate (task)".  That's just asking for trouble.

There are lots of ways people currently use entire sites or communication types as different types of channels.

Sometimes you use a channel to reach a particular group, sometimes you use it because it provides pseudo-privacy, sometimes because it signals urgency or lack thereof.  Sometimes something that seems like a very simple channel is actually very complex (the most notable example is Twitter).

For example, I use

* email: rapid ad-hoc bi-drectional "private" communication - also if I want to be sure you will see it (the TCP of messaging)

* SMS (text messaging): realtime 1-1 bi-directional "private" communication; urgent; expectation that message will interrupt someone

* Facebook: either "private" sharing with a group (friends) or sharing-because-it's-where-everyone-is for e.g. work people who don't use other channels - but with no real expectation everyone will see it (the UDP of messaging)

* Yammer: in theory for sharing with closed work group of people just at my department (I say in theory because there is not enough use to see if it works well)

* Twitter: public stuff of interest with no expectation everyone will see it (UDP) plus signals of topics (hashtags) AND signals of per-individual interest (@ someone is public way of signalling, DM says this is both important and "private") AND accounts for different types of audiences (e.g. some people use different accounts for regular tweeting and livetweeting, or different accounts for different topics)

* blog: a mix of long-form ideas (with no expectation they will be read) and link sharing (for people who don't follow other channels)

* Topic or participant-specific groups: many tools (Facebook, LinkedIn etc. etc.) provide this feature where people with a common interest or some other factor in common can have a shared space.

There are channels that I never use, just due to the particular group of people I communicate with and history (e.g. use of instant messaging grew long after I was in the habit of emailing friends).

The short overview above is just to make the point that there is a lot more nuance to "the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions" as Google puts it than just controlling what channel you push into.  For work content, public with at-destination filtering (e.g. publish & subscribe) may make more sense as I usually don't know a priori per-individual what content may be of interest, and I'm usually not engaged in pseudo-hiding content from one group or another.

In summary, at the moment Circles only makes sense to me as a way to NOT share content with selected individuals, which is more of a Facebook use case, but be mindful that at best this is just the appearance of not sharing content; it can be copied and made public at any time.  The single most notable absence in Google+ is the lack of groups.  Since Circles are not just per-source filtering, but fully or partially hidden per-source filtering (you can't see who is in someone else's groups, or even their group names), Circles doesn't help people form interest groups.  This is kind of weird since one of the aspects of the Internet is that, far from being the anti-social medium portrayed sometimes in the media, the Internet leads almost naturally, organically, to people forming discussions around common topics of interest.  Google does of course have an entire Groups product, called, well, Google Groups, which is an inheritor of the USENET tradition of granular per-topic discussions.

There are a lot of ways that Google could make this experience easier:

* first and foremost Google+ needs to provide Group functionality - just a next-generation version of Google Groups would probably do this

* use GMail data to suggest groups (this technology has already been built by Google, it will suggest possible "missing people" when you compose an email, based on people you usually email together)

- similarly use GReader and GBuzz data

* partner with LinkedIn to suggest groups - either based on connections (see my post LinkedIn maps my connections on LinkedIn clustering) and/or based on existing LinkedIn groups

* extract communication patterns from Twitter to suggest groups, also allow import/conversion of Twitter lists

* alllow various location-based groupings including: location groups based on profile location (or past location) information; location groups based on location detection in browser; location groups based on topic declarations (for example I would like to be able to share information just of local interest to Ottawa residents, but there's no way I'm going through every single person who follows me and figuring out who lives in the Ottawa area)

* allow recipient (destination) filtering by content type and content source, so I can e.g. choose to see all your posted external links but none of your photos or status messages (Facebook provides this to a limited extent and Friendfeed provides this for every separate content source it knows of)

* statistics so you can discover who is using & sharing and "+1ing" your content and can adjust your channel models accordingly

* pull channels (e.g. pull in content from Twitter, perhaps filtered by hashtag)

Ultimately the point is that our interactions are much richer than a flat communication model - but Google has provided only one small aspect, pre-filtering at source, out of a much much larger set of source, topic, and urgency filters.  Pre-filtering at source is mainly use for (an illusion of) personal information control, not for work sharing.  Google+ does not come anywhere near modelling the way people currently signal public/private, topics and urgency by their choice of channels.

There is a great post that explains this much better than I have above: Dave Gray - Sharing universe.

Google+ is social signals data for search

I think it's a mistake to think of Google+ as a Facebook replacement or even as an attempt to replace Facebook.

Google has a basic problem: they make their money from search ads.  Mostly from search ads when people are looking to buy something.  So a search like "best 2009 used cars" represents a ton of money for them.  A Facebook posting "hey guys, can anyone recommend a good 2009 used car?" is a disaster for Google.  Not only is it probably invisible to their indexing engine, it connects people to information without search intermediation that you can attach ads to.

So Google has two problems: 1) people are moving out of its search-driven search space into one-to-many questions to selected groups of people 2) Google doesn't have a lot of rich information about the social context of people who are searching.  Things Google might want to know: how connected is the searcher, how influential, how wealthy, what interests does she have, what content does she share...

Some people stay logged in to Google (GMail) all day, but this trackable identity can be lost if e.g. the user is reading GMail using iPad mail app, or if like me they only login to GMail web for a few minutes, check email, and then log out.

Google would much rather have a single, perpetual, always-logged-in identity.  A social network with a notification bar encourages people to stay logged in, lest they miss a notifcation.

Google is a data-driven organisation.  So let us imagine that through Google+ "all" Google gets is a complete map of the social graph of all the top tech influencers in the world, along with the kinds of things they like to share, and their interests (their "sparks" in Google+ terminology).  And along with that, Google gets social graphs for a few million other people.  Even if G+ then only limps along, Google now has much better data to analyse for its core search business.

So I think Google+ is mainly about providing Google with enormous amounts of data that it can analyse to determine social signals for search, to understand Q&A social behaviour, to find out how people are grouped and interconnected, and to have data to drive social driven re-ranking and display.  But most importantly by far, it gives Google the beginnings of data to optimise ads for the social graph.  Would you rather pay 1 cent to display your ad to someone who has zero tech influence, or $1000 to get your ad in front of the eyeballs of a tech influencer whose posts are reposted and retweeted thousands of times?  Would you rather pay 1 cent to display an ad to random people based on search keywords, or $100 to display the ad to a "circle" of people who have demonstrated a sustained interconnected interest in your particular topic?

This post inspired by GigaOm: Why Google+ won’t hurt Facebook, but Skype will hate it found via @nicholemcgill

Previously:
July 1, 2011  Google Plus

Google Plus

Google Plus launched in limited release Tuesday June 28, 2011.  Google says

Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online. Yet the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools.

In this basic, human way, online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it.

Google Blog - Introducing the Google+ project: Real-life sharing, rethought for the web - June 28, 2011

Plus, which lives at http://plus.google.com/ , is a social network centred around sharing a few types of content: text, photos, links and locations.  There was a brief window opened with lots of invites going out, but it's still in "Field Trial" and they've disabled additional invites for the moment.

We've shut down invite mechanism for the night. Insane demand. We need to do this carefully, and in a controlled way. Thank you all for your interest!

Vic Gundotra (reported by businessinsider.com to be VP of Social at Google), in a public post on Google Plus - https://plus.google.com/107117483540235115863/posts/PhJFJqLyRnm - June 29, 2011 at 11:45PM

As a rough overview, Google+ is very very much like Facebook.

The home page of Google+ is called Stream and works much like the Facebook News Feed.  From a user interface perspective they're basically identical.  Here's a zoom in on the two share boxes at the top of the respective home screens:

Google Plus

Facebook

Google manages sharing rights (who can see things you share) using "Circles", which are groups of people you select.  Facebook manages sharing rights using Friend Lists (if you've never seen Facebook's feature, you can configure it by clicking on Friends in the left-hand main menu and then clicking on Manage Friend Lists).

Each service lets you specify per-post what groups of people should be able to see the post.  Google's claim is that Circles are easier to manage and more visibly surfaced as a key feature of the service.  It's certainly true that with Circles you can drag and drop people around, and there are some animations when you perform various actions on Circles (the most notable being when you delete a circle, it rolls away and disappears).

I'm not convinced however that this somewhat-better sharing list management is enough of a killer app to distinguish Google+ from Facebook.  And Facebook could easily and I assume quickly slap a better user interface on top of its existing Friend List feature, which is already surfaced at the bottom of every post (by clicking on the lock icon, as shown in the screenshot above).  And I'm not sure that "Your Circles" and "Extended Circles" is clearer language than "Friends only" and "Friends of friends" (the functionality described by those two sets of phrases is the same, "Extended Circles" = "Friends of friends").

Just as Facebook posts have "Like - Comment - Share" (with share only appearing depending on post rights), Google+ has +1 - Comment - Share.  Google+ posts ALWAYS have share, by default.  You have to manually disable resharing (which you can only do on an individual post after it is created, not globally) if you don't want people to have a Share link for your post.

SIDEBAR: Google+ and Google Plus One

In a move which will create endless brand confusion, Google Plus, the social network, and Google Plus One, the "Like" button, are two different things.  But Google Plus also uses +1 buttons on posts to indicate the equivalent of a Facebook "Like".

You can read more about the global use of +1 across the web at http://www.google.com/+1/button/ and there's also a June 1, 2011 post about it in the Google Blog.

END SIDEBAR

You can also chat (the same as in Facebook).  And you get notifications if e.g. someone adds a comment to an item you posted (the same as in Facebook).  You can indicate people in a post by using a + and selecting their name (in Facebook you use an @).

If you're in the main interface, there are basically only two things you can see that don't translate directly into Facebook features: Sparks, which is a way of (on a separate screen) getting search results for keywords of interest, and Hangout, which is a multi-way video chat.

And indeed when you go to the main plus.google.com page without being logged in, the three things it shows as features are Circles, Hangout and Sparks.  The other two features Google mentions if you drill down are Instant Upload (every photo and video you take on your mobile device immediately goes onto G+; better have a good data plan and a fast connection; only works on Android at the moment) and Huddle (basically a small group chat, like a private IRC chat room).

That's basically it.  And yes of course it's initial field trial preliminary first features etc. etc.

Stephen Levy wrote a long article for Wired about the project: Inside Google+ — How the Search Giant Plans to Go Social.  I do like the code name, "Emerald Sea".  And there's no doubt a lot more to come.  But right now, it's basically Facebook, except without your social graph there, for people with a Gmail address.

UPDATE 2011-07-01: A couple other points worth mentioning

1) It appears that unlike Facebook which limits you to a (perhaps insider-joke) 420 character maximum per initial status update, Google+ lets you write status posts that are as long as you want - Andy Hertzfeld wrote a public post that is essentially a blog post - https://plus.google.com/117840649766034848455/posts/FddaP6jeCqp

2) I also note that the URLs that G+ produces (as with the giant jumble of plus.google.com/USERID/post/POSTID above) are terrible SEO - Google Search loves URLs with descriptive text in them, not URLs that are just alphanumeric jumbles.

ENDUPDATE

Surprising absences:

* you can't search the Stream.  Yes, that's right, Google, the company built on search, provides no way for you to search the stuff that is posted (which was a bit of a pain as I tried to assemble this blog post from items that I and others had posted in the Stream)

* There is no real integration with Google Buzz - it's not even easy to find Google Buzz, which is hidden away in your own profile, under Buzz.

* There is no integration whatsoever with Google Docs or Google Reader, two key places where people have existing social networks where they share and comment.  There's also no integration with Google Books, a rich source of content.

* It's actually very hard to get content into Google Plus other than by copying and pasting, or uploading.  There's no bookmarklet to share into the service.  There's no way to import RSS feeds.  There's no way to gateway to or from Twitter or to/from bookmarking services (even Google Bookmarks).

* It appears that photos added to G+ also go into Picasa Web, and you can "import" photos into the G+ display from G+.  It seems that videos added live inside G+, they don't go to YouTube.

* There is no way to share content by topic, e.g. there are no hashtags or tags you can apply to posts.

* There is no way to filter by content e.g. you can't set a setting so that you see all of someone's posted links, but none of their posted photos.

* There's no chain of attributions, unlike Tumblr - if Bob shares Sue's post and I reshare it from Bob, you never see that I got it from Bob, you only see that it's from Sue.

* Via Brian Alkerton I found out there doesn't appear to be any way to see the global public stream (the stream of all public updates) although later in the discussion it mentions you can see public posts "nearby" (that is tagged with locations close to your current one) using the Android app

UPDATE 2011-07-01: You can also get the "nearby" option on the mobile site m.google.com/plus ( or www.google.com/mobile/+/ ).  In Stream you will see a link on the upper-left-hand side that says "< Nearby" (it will of course request your location from your browser; if this is not available nothing will be displayed).  ENDUPDATE

* There's no API although ReadWriteWeb reports you can sign up for a developers mailing list.

* I don't know if you can get Analytics or other stats on your Public posts.

And there are of course various bugs and eccentricities.

Additionally, for all the emphasis on Circles and privacy, it's still pretty easy to leak stuff out.  Bob posts in his stream, Sue shares the post, now I can share the post too, even if I don't know Bob.  Posts only say "Public" or "Limited" and when you click on "Limited" you only see (up to 21) individual user names, not the circles that you used in the original rights on the post.

Also, Circles themselves are private objects, you can't see what circles I've put you in, and I can't make a circle and share it with other people in the way I can make a Twitter list and share it.  Other than Huddle there's no way for people in a Circle to all get in one place and do things together, there's no concept of group spaces.

However, surprisingly, anyone you add to a Circle shows up in a flat list on your public profile by default.  You have to go to https://plus.google.com/me/about/edit/nv in order to change or disable this display (info from a public Plus post by Gary Boyer of Google).

If you set the rights to Public, the post appears on what used to be your Google Profile page, which is now your Plus page.  This is mine: http://plus.google.com/117260312446321547979  There doesn't seem to be any way to claim a short userid URL (e.g. http://plus.google.com/scilib ) - so this is a pretty awkward way of sharing your public identity, unless you and the people you talk to can memorise 21-digit numbers.

There's no confirmation needed before someone can add you to a circle - you have to see the notification that you were added and then add them to the Blocked Circle if you don't want your public content to show up in their stream.

Overall, I am surprised that (whether they intended to do so or not), the field trial as currently released is basically Google Facebook, except with only the main Facebook News Feed features (no apps, no groups, no pages etc.)  This is very different from Wave, which was actually quite difficult to grasp as it was a tool quite unique to the way Lars and Jens Rasmussen liked to work together.  People who have used Facebook in particular, or similar interfaces like Yammer or even the main LinkedIn sharing interface, will have no difficulty understanding the concepts of Google Plus.  But I'm not sure what would draw them to use Google Plus over existing services.

I'm not sure this mental model of many different Circles that all live within one service is the right one.

I thought a lot about circles and I basically share things in the following ways:

* with friends through email if I want to have some confidence that a website leak won't make a private joke suddenly public

* with friends through Facebook if it's a general thing that doesn't need any response.  specifically photos through Facebook.  Facebook not because I like it particularly, I'd rather just put stuff in a private space on e.g. Flickr but it's too hard to get people into pseudo-private web sharing spaces other than Facebook.

* everything else I do is either work public, or Ottawa public, or personal commentary, or interest-specific public.

- if it's work public and short or a link, I put it on Twitter (I sometimes copy to Facebook, Yammer, emails or other locations ONLY because not everyone follows Twitter)

- if it's work public and either I really think it's of particular interest or it's some longform thoughts I put it in my blog (which echos out through RSS to various channels including FriendFeed and even a dedicated Twitter broadcast account @scilibfeed)

- if it's about events in Ottawa, Ottawa urban planning, something I saw walking down the street, or a snarky comment etc. I put it into my personal Twitter or my personal blog

- if it's interest-specific, I go where the people are - I might post digital photography info to dpreviews.com, or Ottawa building photos to SkyscraperPage Ottawa forum, or Battlestar Galactica thoughts to an io9 comments thread.

Here's the thing: this doesn't map well to Google Plus Circles at all.  Other than e.g. pictures of my friends' pets, everything is public, it's just public in different places and channels.  It's not all in different private circles.  And even "work public" is more nuanced than that, because that has sub-interest categories as well, all of which I can signal by using blog post tags or Twitter hashtags.  It's very rare that I want to reach just a small number of specific people, and when I do I always send an email.  I don't see circles replacing those targetted emails for me.  In any case, in general I want to reach anyone on the entire Internet with a particular interest e.g. in open data / #opendata, not just people I know who have that interest.

So in the end, unless Google brings out deep integration with more Google products, and a lot more unique features that are useful to people, I don't see how Google Plus competes either with its obvious direct competitor, Facebook, nor with its secondary competitors (e.g. LinkedIn and Yammer) nor with the general public web tools (blogs and microblogs, photo-sharing sites, video-sharing sites, topic-specific sites).

Another way in which this is clearly NOT the public web is that there are Community Standards for Google Plus.  (I am thankful to jilliancyork.com for comparing the Facebook and Google Plus community standards).  This is a policed sharing network, with specific types of content excluded (basically, the same types of content that Facebook prohibits, including nudity).  This is not a way for you to create your own private sharing space, this is a policed space that Google permits you to use - and remember of course the maxim "If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold."  (UPDATE 2011-07-11: quote attributed to Andrew Lewis aka blue beetle - thanks to @drs1969 for pointer to blog post with info and to @RepoRat for confirmation.  ENDUPDATE)

A function that is useful to me, content aggregation and discussions with groups, is currently provided by FriendFeed but it's pretty clear that it is doomed (Facebook bought FriendFeed and immediately put their staff on new projects).  One direction that Google Plus could go would be to be a content aggregator in the way that FriendFeed is, as I said on Plus:

If G+ made it possible to 1) automatically stream content in and 2) create topic discussion group areas, then I think it would be a usable replacement for FriendFeed.

But I don't know that there are enough people with the use case of aggregating content (or the energy to set up and maintain all the imports) in order to make that use case generally useful.  (In case you're wondering what it looks like in practice, my FriendFeed account is http://friendfeed.com/scilib but I have to admit that Twitter is by far the main place I share and discuss content now.)

I do anticipate that the +1 button will become more integrated across Google properties and will become the primary way to share into Google Plus (right now although there is a "share" box in the new black Google toolbar, it doesn't pre-populate with a page url when you click it when you're visiting another Google site).  And I expect that there will be more integration with other Google services generally.  More options is always better, and Google Takeout is a nice guarantee of content portability.  It's certainly a much smoother launch than the privacy disaster of Buzz or the confusion of Wave.  But I still see a leaning towards dubious defaults (e.g. the displaying of people you've added to your circles, requiring locating an obscure setting screen to disable) combined with a lack of compelling, unique new features.

Time will tell.

Flash cookie management on 64-bit Windows

Flash version 10.3 now has a local control panel for managing "Flash cookies".  These are identifying strings, like browser (web) cookies, that can be used to track you across sessions or record settings information.  Previously it was really difficult to see and manage this separate set of cookies.

You can read more in the Flash Player 10.3 Release Notes and Flash Player: Settings Manager.

I run Windows Vista 64-bit and I was puzzled that my Flash 10.3.181.26 install didn't show anything in Control Panel - then I checked carefully and realised there is a 32-bit Control Panel icon.

Note: Unlike Vista, Windows 7 64-bit does not separate the 32-bit control panels, the control will show in the main window as Flash Player (32 bit).

For more information about the information tracked using cookies you can read the Privacy Commissioner's pages Cookies – Following the crumbs: FAQ and Web Tracking with Cookies.

Here's the Windows Vista Control Panel icon

the 32-bit Control Panel items I have

and the Flash Player Settings Manager

You probably want to look at Local Storage Settings by Site, Remove any you don't want, and then set it to Ask me before allowing new sites.