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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."
--
find a co-founder
But people are not generally patient enough to pay attention to such details when setting their google profiles and they are the ones who raise a big cry about privacy not being respected.
Best option for Google user privacy can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=32046
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
I guess this whole privacy snafu wasn't a big deal to me because I actually read their instructions.
No, the information about which settings do what weren't in 72pt type, but it's not like they were unintelligible or not there, or not presented to the user right away. But since I actually read the instructions they gave and read the dialog boxes that came up, I didn't lose any privacy I didn't want to lose (or hadn't already given up through other channels).
People just don't read. Ask any program designer. You know why so many programs have terrible help menus and help files? Because writing them is a thankless job. A fraction of a percent will actually look at the information you give them about how your program works and how to make it do what you want. If they do somehow get around to looking at the information you provide, they don't read it; they skim it for keywords and then barely read enough to try something else.
So, yes, Google could have made it more clear what was happening when you set up Buzz, but it's not like they yanked your pants down when you weren't looking.
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.
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.
Karma fed to this user will be promptly burnt. Be warned; be wary.
Google, the company that bought Double Click. Privacy is against their business model. Nuf sed.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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.
In the wake of massive Buzz privacy problems, Google has announced that its slogan "Don't Be Evil" will be extended for the 2010s with "But Do Be Stupid."
"I don't see how people could ever have thought it wasn't perfect," said Google marketing marketer Todd Jackson. "We tested it in-house for ages, and our test group of white male engineers all working inside a single corporation thought it was the best thing ever! So of course we didn't see the need for any user testing or opt-in."
Gmail users have been up in arms at their frequent email contacts and private addresses that forward to Gmail being publicly revealed, their precise GPS location being automatically posted with updates from their mobile phone and that switching off Buzz doesn't actually switch it off.
"We have heard of the case of the woman whose violent stalker could track her through the Buzz function she didn't actually switch on," said Bishop. "But should she actually be killed, we will of course apologise for her poor product experience. Though it's obvious it's her own fault for not having first found the function hidden behind three panels to untick 'KEEP MY STALKER UPDATED ON MY EVERY MOVE.' Some people just shouldn't be let near computers."
Jackson emphasised the non-evil nature of Google. "We are most definitely not evil. But if, y'know, evil just sorta happens, well. We just send the rockets up. It's not our job to think about where they land."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
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.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
I disagree. "Being evil" does denote intent in my opinion. They're just being irresponsible and careless with their power, which is just as reprehensible if not more, because they don't realize it.
> 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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
Here's the problems, so far as I can tell from the back-and-forth:
1. Google Buzz is opt-out.
2. Google Buzz treats gmail contacts as "friends".
3. Google Buzz exposes "friends" in your profile. This is also opt-out.
This means that people who have never interacted with Buzz at all *already* have had their privacy exposed. And people who *have* interacted with buzz may not know about the problem.
How do you fix this? Well, you can't "unsee" things on the Internet, so they can't undo any compromises that have happened as a result of this exposure, but they could block everyone's friends lists and make everyone opt in again. Have they done that? I still see Buzz showing up in my list of filters, and the option to display friends is still opt-out. Making it more obvious IF YOU GO LOOKING FOR IT doesn't change the fact that it's on by default.
And it still did something that completely stunned me.
I didn't want buzz. I don't like Facebook, Myspace, or Twitter. I just want a damn e-mail account that just sends e-mail. So when it popped up and asked if I wanted to use Buzz, I clicked No.
Small point here that is important later...I have never created nor set up a Google Profile.
So, a friend whom I e-mail quite regularly buzzed a few things. I was automatically set up to follow him. Why? I said, "I don't want Buzz, take me to my inbox."
Then a few friends of his, who I know of but I have never exchanged e-mails with, replied to his buzz. *This becomes "interesting" in a second. *
So today, I read through Slashdot and find a link explaining how to truly turn off buzz. One step is to look at your profile. I don't have a profile I says to myself. So I go to the Google profile page and log in, not Create a Profile, but log in. Oh look, a skeleton profile, with a big blue Create Profile button at the bottom. I click the "Contacts" tab at the top and there are a bunch of contacts that are not mine. People I have never e-mailed, at all. I look at the names and recognize them as friends of my friend. I may have received some e-mails in the past with them in the Cc field, but I never e-mailed these people. And here they are as part of my contacts all because they replied to my friend's Buzz.
WTF? Why do I then have to explicitly remove them as contacts? I never explicitly added them, Google made that decision without asking me. It was a shitty implementation and a complete failure at security and privacy.