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.'"

Comments

Re:The real story

[QuantumG]

Well, the fact is that this person, who is clearly non-technical, was misinterpreting what she was seeing. This is the fault of the engineers for writing a crappy UI (it's called "consensus presentation" in UI class guys) but no actual harm was done. None of her private Reader posts were delivered to her abusive ex-husband or the stalkers who email her - it just looked that way because she assumed that if its in her buzz feed then it's in theirs, cause that's the way it works on Twitter/Facebook. Actually, that's not precisely true, she also confused 'follower' and 'following' in a way that makes no sense for those other two services too.

Admit it, this is exemplary customer service.

[mano.m]

They released a product. They got feedback from the people who use it. They acted swiftly and concretely, fixing the product by listening to the feedback and making the user experience more relevant and comfortable. I for one wouldn't mind more companies doing the same, and not just in software.