Google Tweaks Buzz To Tackle Privacy Concerns 153
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.'"
The real story (Score:5, Interesting)
This blog [wordpress.com] 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 [fairsoftware.net]
Re:The real story (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:The real story (Score:5, Interesting)
If she enabled Buzz, I don't see it as necessarily the case that she's misinterpreting it. When I enabled Buzz, instantly I was following 8 people, and 7 of those people were following me back, based on the fact that we'd email a bunch. As I read it, that's what she thinks happened--- that Google had her ex-husband auto-follow her, because they'd exchanged emails. Unlike Facebook, you don't have to approve followers, either. And, your Google Reader comments are by default visible to your followers, something I also didn't realize until one of those 7 followers of mine commented on a post of mine.
Now in my case those 7 auto-followers are people I actually know and don't object to following me, and I had nothing particularly private in my Google Reader comments, but it was still quite surprising and felt a bit weird that it was all done automatically. I would've felt much more comfortable if Google used email history to suggest contacts, but I still had to approve people individually before they could get access to my stuff. It'd also be nice if it asked me explicitly if I wanted my Google Reader comments shared over Buzz.
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your Google Reader comments are by default visible to your followers
Is that the case, even if you've previously set your Reader comments to be visible only to specific people (as the blogger in this case apparently had)?
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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Buzz is like Twitter with privacy settings. If you post a public buzz, it is _public_ - even people who don't even have gmail accounts can read it. And yes, everyone following you gets your public buzzes. Just like everyone following you gets your twitter messages. And everyone on your friend lists gets everything you do on Facebook, even if you're posting on someone else's page. Welcome to social networking. If you don't like how that works, either use the privacy settings, which at least on Buzz are fairl
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Uhhh.. no you didn't. What you did was misconstrue what I was saying..
Twitter, and Buzz, (and I guess Facebook, I don't use it so I don't really know) are RSS feeds for the masses.
They aggregate "updates" together and show you a feed. My feed looks different to your feed, that's the point of it. In order to facilitate conversation the outgoing feed and the incoming feed are aggregated into a single feed. So when I say "hey folks, just signed up to Buzz", it appears in my feed, even though I'm not follow
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Re:The real story (Score:4, Interesting)
You don't even have to have an abusive ex-husband. I found I had acquired a follower with the unlikely name of "Kleetman Nissanka." Our buddy Kleetman seems to have assembled a collection of people to follow--all of whom are women, and all of whom have the same first name as mine. He may have found my public profile (which lists two websites, both business-related), but I certainly didn't give him permission to follow me. I have now cleansed Kleetman from my profile and re-disabled Buzz. I guess people at Google don't have to worry about stalkers, spammers, and other assorted gentry.
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Umm.. that's the same on Twitter, where only if you have a private profile do you need to specifically "allow" followers.. by default, anyone can follow anyone, and if you don't like someone, you block them.
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Both of you are missing the point. Both Twitter and Facebook can be set up to confront you directly and say something along the lines of, "Kleetman is now following you/wants to be your friend. OK with you? (yep/nope)" That provides the opportunity to opt out (as it were) and the opportunity to do a bit of trivial checking-up if desired. The perception of being followed by a mysterious individual who roams the Intertubes assembling lists of women named "Anne" is just plain distasteful.
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The perception of being followed by a mysterious individual who roams the Intertubes assembling lists of women named "Anne" is just plain distasteful.
PokémAnne: gotta catch'em all!
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THE POINT IS IF YOU SIGNED UP FOR TWITTER YOU KNEW EXACTLY WHAT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN.
When I signed up for Gmail, I didn't expect to have all this crap about people following me, seeing my Google Reader posts, etc.
People signed up to Gmail for EMAIL. Now, they're are mixing Twitter functionality with something that I don't want associated with it, AND I HAVE NO CONTROL.
Too bad they fucked up their initial launch. Because of my privacy concerns, I have shut it off completely, and I will NEVER revisit Buzz ag
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You blame Gmail for adding Buzz when it wasn't what you "signed up for", and yet you take no responsibility for the fact that you chose to click the "Yes, I'd like to try Buzz" button when entering Gmail. You had the option to click "No, thanks", but you didn't.
I have no sympathy for you. Perhaps you should first have tried to find out what turning on Buzz would do?
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No, stupid. Read more carefully. They asked if you want to "check out buzz" or if you would rather go to your inbox. There was no choice to turn it on or off initially. It's on by default and you have to turn if off, which I did.
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He may have found my public profile (which lists two websites, both business-related), but I certainly didn't give him permission to follow me
I think you fail in comprehending the meaning of the word "public".
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I think you fail in comprehending the meaning of the word "public".
There is a world of difference between:
a) the public profile - a static Web page that shows text that you personally put there (or allowed to be put there.)
b) the privilege of seeing contacts and comments made by that person, now and forever.
For example, all I know about daveime from your public profile on /. is what comments you made here. Imagine if suddenly I get access to your email contacts and, through search or social enginee
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by "cleansed" I assume you mean "clicked Block next to their name"? It's a pretty simple system really, one that seems to show Google did think about how to block "stalkers, spammers and other assorted gentry".
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Who you've been emailing used to be and should be private. With the default settings in Buzz, it becomes public. That's not not evil.
Re:The real story (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it doesn't. Because it specifically deals with a case where someone does have something to hide. (Also, it doesn't make sense, since, even with the way Buzz was set up before these change, had to be manually added and prominently displayed its sharing settings. And, further, it seems to be based on faulty assumptions about what the meaning of someone being a "follower" are and what they could see, anyhow.)
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It shows more eloquently than any privacy advocate ever could why privacy is so important when "you don't have anything to hide."
No, it doesn't. Because it specifically deals with a case where someone does have something to hide.
Parent comment is disingenuous. When people say "I don't have anything to hide", they mean that if you don't do anything wrong you have no need for privacy, because you would only want to hide things that are illegal or otherwise wrong. Grandparent comment is exactly correct in pointing out the error of this all-too-common reasoning.
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No, its not.
Uh, no, when people say "I don't have anything to hide", they don't mean "if you don't do anything wrong you have no need for privacy".
Nor do they mean that when they say "If you don't have anything to hide, you have no need for privacy". There are people who have made the statement "If you aren't doing something wrong, you have no need for pri
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Except that is NOT the case. It automatically added a picassa album and a blog of mine - BOTH of which were set to "private" or "invite only" - and several people who were set to automatically follow me sent me emails about some of the pictures in my album and comments about the blog posts. I NEVER enabled Buzz (I said "Not right now" when it asked me if I wanted to do it) and I NEVER enabled either the blog or the album to be added.
This was a total clusterfuck on Google's part. Because of their stupid and
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Neither one of which is Google Reader, and so neither one of which is something I said had to be manually added.
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Yeah, I totally agree. The guy who designed that Buzz icon totally needs to be punished for contributing to the project. He had a responsibility to make sure that the launch went off without a hitch and in accordance with your desires that he didn't live up to. He definitely needs to lose his job.
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File this under fall-out from using real people for quality control. Coincidentally, one of the most beneficial uses of Facebook is those extremely lame quizzes that replace paid census groups.
Beware the lab rat aspect of social networking. It's pretty easy to avoid if you're not an incurable idiot. Sometimes I can't help but be thankful there are so many stupider people out there to determine what's stupid for me. I almost don't need to be smart anymore.
Yes, that was supposed to be creepy and self-depr
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There is another aspect to the lack of privacy that is slightly more subtle than people seeing someone's contacts on their own profile page.
Even if you have no public profile and have Buzz "turned off", people you follow / are followed by can still see your following status on others' profiles if you have a follow / followed relationship with that person as well.
Example: Person A has no public profile, and has Buzz "turned off." Person A follows / is followed by Persons B and C because of the [ridiculous] B
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Maybe there needs to be a way for her to remove her abusive ex from her list of contacts.
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Re:The real story (Score:5, Insightful)
Twitter is used for public communication.
E-mail, Gmail is front-end of, is used for private communication.
Why the difference is so hard to understand??
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Heh, you make an interesting point, and that perception clearly is relevant.
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Because when you signed up for Twitter you knew exactly what you were getting...an open communication forum where anyone with a Twitter account can follow you.
When I signed up for GMail, many years ago, I got an e-mail account that behaved like an e-mail account. People could only read items I expressly passed onto them. Google's launch of Buzz basically broke that level of privacy.
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Bah. Google's launch of Buzz broke nothing. It was your choice to try Buzz. When entering Gmail and given a choice, you clicked the "opt-in" button instead of the "opt-out" button. Followers weren't added until after you clicked the button. Did you read all the available, Google-provided information about what would happen when you opted in, or did you just say, "Oh neat! A new toy!"
You could have continued to use Gmail just as you were, with no changes and no Buzz.
Take some responsibility for your ow
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In order to follow someone on Google Buzz, the person you follow has to have a public profile. Try creating a new gmail account, opting out of Buzz, not going through with the profile setup, and then following the new account with the old one. Buzz won't let you do that last part.
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Maybe that is true now, but not when they first released it. I don't have a Google profile. I just use GMail and nothing else and yet one of my contacts was able to follow me on Buzz and I was automatically set up to follow him. On top of that, I wound up with friends of his in my contacts because they follow him on Buzz and I've never had contact with them (ie. I never sent any of them an e-mail, ever).
Oh, and in reply to your response to my original post, I did opt-out of Buzz when first presented with
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Wow, you're a careful dude (Score:4, Informative)
> 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.
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The logical fallacy you are looking for is "false dichotomy", and you are totally right.
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Those who have marked this down as flamebait probably missed that this was quoting the opinion on privacy of Eric Schmidt, CEO/Chairman of Google Inc.:
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" [youtube.com]
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Well thanks, at the very least, for linking to the video of the quote, so people have a chance to see that you (and the parent) have used it entirely out of context.
Here's the full quote:
Interviewer: "People are treating Google like their most trusted friend. Should they be?"
Eric Schmidt: "Well, I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engi
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In my post above, I didn't suggest any context whatever for the quote, beyond showing you where it came from.
However, you're giving a horribly generous spin to what Schmidt actually said.
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
That statement is abundantly clear, and is one of the most concise descriptions I've seen of what it means to be against privacy. He hasn't said "maybe you'll be monitored", "maybe you'll be caught", "please be car
Tutorial about privacy before activating Buzz (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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except the biggest flaw is that you can't NOT activate buzz. that little "nah, take me to my inbox" link does all the buzz setup behind the scenes and activates your feed regardless. nor can you opt-out after the fact.
Re:Tutorial about privacy before activating Buzz (Score:5, Insightful)
You can opt out by choosing the "turn off Buzz" link at the bottom of your Gmail page.
Re:Tutorial about privacy before activating Buzz (Score:5, Informative)
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Good advice in that cnet article.
I went to http://www.google.com/profiles [google.com] to look up my profile.
No search box, so I clicked on the first example name. [google.com]
And then I read her last buzz. :P
Buzz things turn up as a message in your inbox?! Disabling now. Heart attack.
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But it doesn't create a profile for you, so even though you have a feed, no one can follow you. And if someone opts to skip the Buzz set-up process, are they really going to post something to your feed or begin following someone else?
So much buzz about nothing...
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And would have annoyed users that don't like to be treated like infants.
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Those people should have the maturity to DEAL WITH IT.
Buzz saw (Score:5, Funny)
People don't read. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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Read the "fuck you google" blog post. If you said *no* to buzz, it could get set up in a harmful way, which you couldn't configure or change because you had it disabled.
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Read the "fuck you google" blog post. If you said *no* to buzz, it could get set up in a harmful way, which you couldn't configure or change because you had it disabled.
It still comes down to reading instructions. Even if it means reading instructions in other programs too. I meant it when I said "or hadn't already given up through other channels". Buzz doesn't magically make visible anything that you didn't already have visible. If you had your Reader shared items set to private, they stay that way, but if you had them set to public, well, they're public.
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Nope, I'm saying if they care, they should read the instructions. I'm not saying I read all instructions everywhere, and I'm not saying every program/site provides them, but if it's something I care about (like who will see what items and information) then I look for the instructions and read them. I did it for Facebook and I do it for Google stuff.
You care enough about your privacy to have posted anonymously. If you ignored the "Post Anonymously" checkbox and I all of a sudden could see your username, you
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What you say does not seem to be factually correct. Things that were previously visible to only a couple of people suddenly became visible to other people even if you did not enable or accept anything.
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Actually no.. this person just misunderstood what she was seeing, and then when she went to rectify the "problem" discovered that she couldn't.. rather than think that maybe she was just wrong in her initial assumption, and try to actually understand how the system works, she lashed out the way bloggers do - with uninformed, barely intelligible dribble.
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I never got a page instructing me on anything.
Is it something to do with using Gmail Notifier to log in?
I clicked, my mail popped up, and there was this dang coloured round thing on the left, and when I clicked on it it told me I was following a bunch of people and some other crap. I just finished unfollowing and deleting. I don't need all that spam. I'm not even interested in any of the people it auto-followed...
Business model? (Score:2)
I am afraid the entire business model of them are based on the fact that people doesn't read. It is just like spyware (oh sorry, potentially unwanted software!) company who relies on a huge EULA which people will just click "I agree" before it is rendered on screen.
Their bread and butter is petabytes of personal information, if they really harvest it for their lame/uncontrolled ads, it is the good scenario. If they have another plan, it is even worse.
The entire income of mainstream media and some popular bl
I read it, understood it.... (Score:3, Interesting)
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 fe
Re:People don't read. (Score:4, Informative)
Ok, no worries, let me explain it to you.
First of all, find one of these people who you think is following you and click on their profile. For example:
http://www.google.com/profiles/william.pomerantz#buzz [google.com]
Now click on the link that says "William is following 67" or whatever, and look for you name. If you don't see your name, then there's no problem.. but if you do and you don't want that, here's how to fix it:
1. Go to YOUR profile. It will most likely be like Will's, in that it is your name after /profiles/ .. and it would only be like this if you *gave* Buzz you name and clicked the box that says "Display my full name so I can be found in search", and if you said you wanted a nice custom url, otherwise it'll just be some arbitrary number.
2. Uncheck the box that says "Display my full name so I can be found in search"..
3. Remove your full name from the boxes if you want.
Now you can go back to the page of the person who is following you... and select "William is following 67" again, and you will discover that you are now listed in the "other people who do not have public profiles" section.
If you want you can also do:
4. click the link that says "Block" after "[Whoever] is following you".
But you don't need to, because your name is no longer public.... of course, I have no idea how you would have gotten a public profile without asking for one... it took me about 3 attempts to figure out how to get one..
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First of all, find one of these people who you think is following you and click on their profile. For example...
Wow, that is incredibly easy. All you need is a list of everyone on gmail, and you can finish the whole thing in less than a century of non-stop clicking!
When you can stare down China... (Score:2, Redundant)
You have to be at least a tiny bit careful about how you use your power. How is it that Spider-Man figured this out in his first comic, and Google's not figured it out after several years?
"Don't be evil" is more complicated than just not being actively malicious. [seebs.net]
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If you're weak, carelessness isn't a big deal. If you're powerful, carelessness can harm people egregiously. If you know that, and don't care, you're evil. Google does not show any sign of caring how much they hurt people, but they clearly know.
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You have to be at least a tiny bit careful about how you use your power. How is it that Spider-Man figured this out in his first comic, and Google's not figured it out after several years?
Because Google doesn't have an Uncle Ben? Google's a little closer to MPD like Norman and Harry.
The problem with Google (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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That's not the problem.
The problem is that some people think that doing these things via media that are expressly public and searchable is somehow "private", and get really riled up whenever someone makes it more convenient for the people who are intentionally posting things via such media to connect it with the people who would be interested (and, conversely, to find the publicly posted thin
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Yes, actually, it does.
Most people probably would, because the TV cameras are a vivid reminder that they are in the public eye, a fact that they probably weren't particularly cognizant of when the argument started. They'd probably also stop if a random stranger interjected themselves into the already-public argument,
Admit it, this is exemplary customer service. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Admit it, this is exemplary customer service. (Score:4, Informative)
They got feedback from the people who use it.
They also got feedback from the people who didn't want to use it, but weren't given the option to properly opt-out, if I'm reading some of the comments/links correctly...
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Opt-in? really? (Score:2)
I *thought* that welcome page meant it was opt-in too. And told it to take me straight to my email. Buzz still showed up in my list of filters.
Re:Admit it, this is exemplary customer service. (Score:4, Informative)
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No, they forced a product to people who never wanted it. Then they made it *by default* to leak out private details. Then they made the "turn off buzz" option not really working.
You know, that sounds a lot like the IE upgrades.
Re:Admit it, this is exemplary customer service. (Score:4, Insightful)
They betrayed a trust that millions of people had in them by divulging private information that they were privy to. Shame on them, I say, and this is coming from someone who is normally a Google lover and early adopter of their technologies. This whole thing just left a sour taste in my mouth. There is no defense for what they did.
DID they fix the problem? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 hap
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You don't need to share your top email contacts to use Buzz. The people you WANT to share "buzz" with may not even be the top email contacts. So it's not something anyone would expect for "creating a profile" to include sharing this information, and sharing them may be a risk.
Therefore, whether you have created a profile or not, it should be off by default and only enabled by explicit action, not on by default and only disabled by unchecking a box when you create the profile.
So I don't think they actually u
Google is orthogonal to privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
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Orthogonal? As in Google's interests being equally fulfilled regardless of the privacy situation? Orthogonal is 90', you're looking for "diametrically opposite".
opt-out paradigm (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
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they aren't getting burned. the vast, vast majority of people don't have abusive ex-husbands, and don't have people stalking them and in general have nothing they want or need to hide from anyone. that's the average gmail user.
social networks work when they have critical mass ... and that would have been achieved with buzz only a long time from now or maybe even never if they had defaulted to having it off. google made a decision that the average user would be served better by having it on by default.
if you
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the vast, vast majority of people don't have abusive ex-husbands, and don't have people stalking them and in general have nothing they want or need to hide from anyone.
People without enemies are either very young or very cowardly.
Google adopts new "Do, however, be stupid" policy (Score:4, Funny)
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." [newstechnica.com]
"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."
Another SNAFU that they haven't fixed yet (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
They should have talked with Nokia (Score:2)
Nokia which is generally ignored by American public/tech community is testing such "inventions" for years in a real beta form. This far, and let me remind you, Nokia doesn't really make anyone paranoid as Google, nothing they tried has taken off although they have very clever touches for privacy and human emotions.
For example, their IM app (beta, real beta!) has ability to show generic names for your position only to your friends. Even that thing (like @cafe) bothered people. http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/ [allaboutsymbian.com]
Uh...a little help? (Score:2)
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What about POP and IMAP users? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Both of them.
Do they even make POP/IMAP clients anymore?
I don't need more social networking crap (Score:2)
While I must say, it is a nice feature for many, I was really happy with Gmail as it was, with as little added useless crap and blinking ads and all that what ruins other free mail providers.
I suspended my Facebook, do not use Twitter, and closed several social networking accounts to escape people bugging me. Now I have this thing popup saying that I am connected and following a bunch of people I do not even want to hear about :(
Argh ... I think it would have been a nice way to put a popup, a mail or someth
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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.
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Go double-check. A lotta people clicked "HELL NO" and still got opted-in.