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

The real story

[alain94040]

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

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.

Buzz saw

[joelsanda]

Best option for Google user privacy can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=32046

Re:Tutorial about privacy before activating Buzz

[oh_bugger]

The "turn off Buzz" link doesn't actually clean everything up and make things private again. It's misleading.

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.