Google Buzz: A Privacy Disaster
As someone who is no friend to Facebook, I was quite interested to hear that Google will be stepping into the social networking world with their newest product: Google Buzz. The introductory video looked good enough showing a slick, simple interface, easy message, photo and video posting and an good time to be had by all. Perhaps, I thought, this means Facebook’s hegemony over the social networking sphere was coming to a close. Anything is better than Facebook’s blatant disregard for privacy right? Wrong.
Et tu, Google?
Why is it that the default modus operandi of every Internet company is to blatantly violate your privacy as a first rule of business? Google, surely, is a company that should not need a cheap trick like this in order to promote their product. A company whose “Do no evil.” slogan seems to only apply as far as showing you the most targeted ads and not blatantly deceiving you. Google has embraced Facebook overnight revelation that people don’t want or expect and seems to have launched Buzz as an example of this brave new vision.
Buzz outdoes Facebook when it comes to airing all your dirty laundry to the searchable metaverse. The privacy controls in Buzz are all strictly opt-out. You might miss this fact, as I suspect most people will, unless you are naturally suspicious of any site that has access to too much information about you. And yes, we should all be suspicious of them.
Buzz will show your real name and make it searchable to everyone. It will also show the world who you are following and who is following you. Since it populated your follow list from your email contacts, it essentially reveals your contact list to the world. It also shows your Buzz messages on this publicly searchable profile so if you have something private to say to your friend or spouse, make sure you use Gmail and not Buzz. Of course, they both show up in the same Inbox so mistakes are likely.
What makes Google’s actions more inflammatory than Facebook’s is that your GMail data is used to generate this public content. As an email system, GMail implies privacy and strict control over who your messages go to and who can see them. Therefore, all contacts and data in GMail were added by users with the expectation of full privacy. Buzz will, however, happily tell the world who you’ve been emailing the most. Beware.
There has already been a lot of complaints about this so-called privacy flaws. But can anyone really believe that this was a mistake in the design? That Google didn’t know the implications of making Buzz operate like this? They only need to look at Beacon and other privacy scandals Facebook has gone through to know where this leads.
One would think that launching a product like this that will expose the information of millions of users should take a bit of care and preparation. However, as of this time, Buzz doesn’t even have a Privacy Policy listed on Google’s Policy by Product page!
There is no doubt that Google knew exactly what it was doing when they made Buzz work the way it does. I predict that they will run it for a few weeks as is, making it accumulate users, and then they will “fix the problem” due to user complaints. By this time the damage will be done and this privacy “flaw” will have served its purpose.
Should you decide to turn Buzz off, there is microscopic link at the very bottom of the page that will allow you to do this.