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Lawmakers Ask For FTC Investigation of Google Buzz
angry tapir writes "Eleven US lawmakers have asked the FTC to investigate Google's launch of its Buzz social-networking product for breaches of consumer privacy. The representatives — six Democrats and five Republicans from the House Energy and Commerce Committee — noted in their letter that Google's roll-out of Buzz exposed private information of users to Google's Gmail service to outsiders. In one case, a 9-year-old girl accidentally shared her contact list in Gmail with a person who has a 'sexually charged' username, the lawmakers said in the letter."
"In one case, a 9-year-old girl accidentally shared her contact list in Gmail with a person who has a 'sexually charged' username, the lawmakers said in the letter."
In one case, the parents of a 9 year old girl weren't paying attention, like they should have been, while their daughter surfed the web and they were upset at their lack of parenting skills and decided it imperative that they defer to the Federal Government to help them solve this problem.
a "sexually charged" username
What, like Dick Dynamo?
MS is an investor in facebook. why reinvent the wheel when you can just invest in someone to do it for you?
If you suddenly discovered a way of phrasing your requests to your boss that always got you what you wanted, wouldn't you always try to phrase things that way?
We are the bosses of the politicians, so when the politicians realize that they can get whatever they want if they wave the for-the-children flag, I think we can easily understand why they do it so often.
The auto-follow feature was set for people you had repeated correspondence with - i.e. lots of gmail conversations.
In other words, this 9 year old wasn't introduced to the person with the "sexually charged username", whatever the hell that means, the kid had been talking to this guy many times well before Buzz launched.
Buzz just made it plain that the two had been corresponding for some time now.
I swear, politicians have to be some of the dumbest fucking people on earth, it drives me insane sometimes.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
People seem to be jumping on either the "pro-Google" bandwagon or the "anti-'think of the children'" bandwagon left and right. So let's stop and consider this rationally.
Google has changed Buzz to address privacy concerns multiple times. In fact they made so many changes so quickly that it's hard to document exactly what settings it had when without a lot of research. However early on it was easily possible to have the following scenario:
"InnocentUser," a legal adult, has a Gmail account. (Let's even say they got one sometime after July 2009, so Gmail wasn't even in "beta" at the time, just to end-run one particular argument.) They've emailed a number of people using this account. They've also gotten several scary emails from "ImaPredator," which they never responded to.
When Buzz was launched InnocentUser's Google Profile was indexed. The easiest way for this to happen was to "try out" Buzz like Google urged everyone with a Gmail account. However numerous people have reported finding they had their Google Profile indexed without ever actually trying Buzz.
Once your Google Profile was automatically integrated with Buzz it would auto-follow anyone who you emailed with a lot. So InnocentUser has a lot of their usual contacts auto-followed and made visible in their Google Profile. Meanwhile ImaPredator joins Buzz, which notices they emailed InnocentUser a lot (regardless of the fact that InnocentUser never emailed back,) and auto-follows them. Now ImaPredator can go to InnocentUser's Google Profile and see the list of their most common contacts.
That's pretty bad. Of course it's even worse that perhaps InnocentUser did email back ImaPredator once, with a message saying something like "If you ever email me again I'm going to report you to the police." That's good enough for Buzz to decide InnocentUser ought to auto-follow ImaPredator as well! (Once of the people Buzz set me up to auto-follow was someone who i had a single email exchange with. Perhaps because it occurred very shortly before Buzz went live.)
There _was_ an option to disable Buzz. However initially at least all that did was remove the Buzz UI from your end. Your profile was still visible to others and still listed your regular contacts. CNET and other sites published detailed tutorials about how to _actually_ go through all the options and disable Buzz "for realz" because of all the privacy concerns.
When the inevitable, and in my mind quite justified, complaints started, Google went through several rounds of apologizing (but usually with weasel wording such as "we're sorry our users feel like their privacy has been violated" rather than "we're sorry we screwed up") and revising Buzz's behaviour and options. After the third or so revision they reached the point where it was halfway reasonable, and it was fairly easy for everyone who still didn't like it to actually turn it off.
Google definitely did something stupid. If they made the decision to auto-include everyone with a Gmail account in Buzz because they thought it was the only way to catch up with Facebook and Twitter in a reasonable amount of time then what they did could arguably be considered Evil as well. It's unfortunate that the lawmakers are pulling the "think of the children" card when Google clearly did something wrong regardless of the age of the people involved, but that doesn't somehow magically invalidate the wrongness. Google did try to correct things after the fact, but that doesn't change the fact that they did something wrong to begin with, and it's quite possible that some people were hurt by Google's mistakes before changes were implemented.
Certainly a slap on the wrist by the FCC would not be out of line. And an investigation into whether the issues were due to professional negligence or... whatever you call screwing over your users for a "quick buck," also seems quite reasonable to me. If something actually criminal was done (i leave it up to the actual lawyers to determine what would and would not be criminal in this case) then apologizing for it before the "police" actually catch you isn't enough to get you out of trouble. It doesn't work that way for the average citizen and it shouldn't work that way for corporations either.
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