The Negative Buzz Around Google's New Social Network – Bits Blog …
Update | 11:11 p.m. Google implemented changes to Buzz late Thursday that make it easier to adjust settings.
Google’s new social networking service, Buzz, has been live for just two days. but it is already drawing fire for what some are describing as a “huge privacy flaw.”
“If I were working for the Iranian or the Chinese government, I would immediately dispatch my Internet geeksquads to check on Google Buzz accounts for political activists and see if they have any connections that were previously unknown to the government,” wrote Evgeny Morozov on Foreign Policy’s Net.Effect blog.
Even those not at risk of crossing hostile governments may not want their contact lists made public. nor do they necessarily want to follow or be followed by people they e-mail often. One commenter on Google’s help forum, for instance, complained that he was automatically connected to his landlord.
As a late entrant to social networking, Buzz is trying to get off to a fast start by tapping the connections that users have already made through Google’s other services. but critics argue that Google should ask for permission before automatically including those contacts in the Buzz social network.
Representatives for Google have responded to concerns by saying that users can manage their lists once they are created.
“We start you out on Buzz using the Gmail contacts you communicate with frequently. Since we don’t know how they’re connected to you, in some cases, you’ll end up following people you don’t want to be. the good news is that it’s very easy to change that,” an employee wrote on the help forum.
(Silicon Alley Insider has a step-by-step guide showing how to adjust your Buzz privacy settings. You can also turn off Buzz entirely by clicking the button “turn off Buzz” at the bottom of the main Gmail window — look in the fine print below the line that tells you much of your Gmail space you are using.)
The way that Google uses the information it gathers on its users has been a consistent point of contention. the controversy over Buzz mirrors the one in 2007 over Google’s decision to create a similar system for sharing articles tagged by users of its Reader service, which is used to follow RSS feeds.
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