Lost in the swirl of huge companies and their misleading public announcements are their descriptions of exactly what type of identity information is being shared and how. While Facebook, MySpace, and Google all publish technical documentation for developers of some sort, the non-developer has a very hard time grokking it. It’s very hard to see the bigger picture from the technical developer docs.

So kudos to Google for publishing an in-depth post on how Friend Connect works. They go into good depth about what information is shared and when it is shared. For example, they point out that the only bit of profile information that is passed by Google to third-parties using the service is the user’s profile picture…all other data is data that you input into Friend Connect as part of your Google profile.

Now, whether or not you agree with Facebook or Google in the current identity battle (part of a much larger war), you have to admit that this type of transparency is good for end users. We can learn about how these services work in layman’s terms, and can begin to understand what we need to do (if anything) to keep an appropriate level of control over our identity data.

Posts like this one by Google are exactly what we need from those companies who propose identity management technologies.