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Google Tweaks Buzz To Tackle Privacy Concerns
CWmike writes "Just two days after launching its Buzz social networking tools, Google said Thursday night that it had tweaked the technology to address early privacy concerns. Google said in a blog post that the quick updates makes it easier for users to block access to their pages and eases the path to finding two privacy features. 'We've had plenty of feature requests, and some direct feedback,' wrote Todd Jackson, a product manager for Gmail and Google Buzz, in the blog post. 'In particular there's been concern from some people who thought their contacts were being made public without their knowledge (in particular the lists of people they follow, and the people following them). In addition, others felt they had too little control over who could follow them and were upset that they lacked the ability to block people who didn't yet have public profiles from following them.'"
The "turn off Buzz" link doesn't actually clean everything up and make things private again. It's misleading.
Go home and shave your giant head of smell with your bad self
> you are handing your information over to other people, you can't make assumptions
> about what they'll do with it.
This is not making assumptions, rather, it is assigning a risk factor, which is something all of us, including you, do 24/7 (well, at least during all sober waking hours), in order to survive. You do it whenever you drive (never "assume" that the car coming from the other direction isn't going to swerve into your lane?), whenever you deposit money in the bank (or you never "assume" that the bank won't make some mistake, or that your identity won't get stolen, and your money will disappear?), etc.
Your post seems to me to be based on a fallacy which I cannot name, which I will call "reality is binary". This fallacy is common in the security realm, where, for example, people see that a one-time pad is the only absolutely secure encryption and believe it is superior to AES, when the reality is that it never pays to make something absolutely secure, it only pays to make everything secure enough that it isn't worthwhile to make it more secure (and, of course, there is nothing which is absolutely secure, even using a one-time pad, because security also isn't binary).
To avoid this fallacy, you should have said "when you put your information on the internet, it is less private", but of course, that doesn't have the authoritative ring and doesn't look as good in bold letters. Effectively, your post should have dealt with the relative advantages to the woman for using Google Reader to communicate in a semi-private way vs. the probability that something would change and the information would become less private (as it did) and the damages that would cause.
No, they forced a product to people who never wanted it. Then they made it *by default* to leak out private details. Then they made the "turn off buzz" option not really working.