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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.'"
This blog shows what really happened:
I use my private Gmail account to email my boyfriend and my mother.
There’s a BIG drop-off between them and my other “most frequent” contacts.
You know who my third most frequent contact is?
My abusive ex-husband.
Which is why it’s SO EXCITING, Google, that you AUTOMATICALLY allowed all my most frequent contacts access to my Reader, including all the comments I’ve made on Reader items, usually shared with my boyfriend, who I had NO REASON to hide my current location or workplace from, and never did.
It shows more eloquently than any privacy advocate ever could why privacy is so important when "you don't have anything to hide."
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find a co-founder
It's that they just don't get Privacy. Yes, we love Google search, GMail and that Beta stuff they do. But they just don't get privacy. To quote Google Executive Eric Schmidt: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
The trouble is, as the very first post described, we all do things in everyday life we don't want the world to know. Things we're perfectly entitled to do. But Google don't get it. I haven't used Google Docs because I'm scared there's some setting somewhere I won't know to turn off which will expose my documents to the world. Same concerns with GMail. Yahoo might hand your details over to the Chinese Government, but at least you don't need to worry about them telling *everyone* you've ever e-mailed! If a company ever did that, of course it would be Google.
Google is the sort of company that would break into your house and stick a webcam in your toilet "So you can socialize with your friends when you're sitting on the can." And they would be shocked when the people who find out about it object to it. The public is still largely ignorant about privacy, but with incidents like this slowly they will wake up. Google really needs to hire some serious Privacy experts to counterbalance people like Schmidt who can only see the dollars and not the bigger picture. Right now the best way for an upstart to beat Google is to offer everything they do but with the Privacy settings on max.
I think it's a little early to draw conclusions on this. People were fairly skeptical about Android when it was new, and now look at it.
I'm not rooting for it overtly, but I'd like to see more integration in our products. Face book's messaging system is so redundant. Perhaps it's time that we have email duplicate social rather than social duplicate email.
First, I'm amazed that Google would stumble out of the blocks like this. Isn't this the same company that keeps things in "beta" and "labs" for years and years? Had this "feature" been available for the general public to play with for a month or three before bringing out the "big guns"--opt-out implementation for all gmail users--these shortcomings would have been caught and remedied before they were inflicted on unsuspecting non-power-users.
Second, I can certainly appreciate the difficulty of creating the spark of life in a new social network platform. Ordinary players in the market have to hope that lightning strikes. As Google already has learned with Orkut, if lightning doesn't strike, maybe your product can find a niche somewhere in the long tail. Or it will never come to life at all. With Buzz, Google decided they didn't want to risk a sunny day, and chose instead to play with the high voltage line. Insta-social network by compelling everyone to connect with their personal email addresses. Deservedly, they're now getting burned--Gmail was many people's default "real" personal email site. Compelling a connection between people's real personal email address to a social network (on an opt-out basis) might shake people free of that preference...
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
At least it hadn't been fixed when i tested it a couple hours ago. If you go to the profile settings there is an option called "Display my full name so I can be found in search." If you uncheck that box and save it your profile will now say "visible to the public as [whatever your nickname is]." YOu'll also get a warning about how your profile won't be searchable as long as that option is disabled, which is exactly what one would expect from the description.
However if you then try to do something with Buzz ("Like" a post or leave a comment) a browser-internal dialog will pop up asking "How do you want to appear to others?" It's a pretty small dialog with the only thing you can really select being if you want who you follow to be public or not, so clearly this is part of their solution to the complaints about privacy. However if you select "save profile and continue" you will then find that the "Display my full name" checkbox has been turned back on, without any notification at all! And of course if you uncheck it again, the next time you try to do anything with Buzz you'll have to go through the dialog again. There is an "edit" button on the dialog which opens up more options, but even under there there's no option to leave the "display full name" option unchecked. (Although it was hard to determine that since the dialog that pops up is taller than my browser window, so i had to maximize the window just to be able to see it all.)
Note that you are never told "you must make your full name public in order to use Buzz" and the option itself says nothing about Buzz, just that your profile won't be searchable. It's not clear if that's the behaviour Google wanted (which would be stupid) and they're just not telling us about it (which would also be stupid) or if they just screwed up the dialog and settings in their rush to address the privacy concerns.
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I wonder how many people that do not use the web interface, but have gmail accounts, will not even know they are exposed.
Going back to using only my own email servers because who knows what stupid thing they are going to dump on the web next.
Living in Chile