Does no one pay attention? (ETA more links)

[pecunium]

Do the lessons of other Social Networking aps not get looked at when a new one is being developed?

Google has launched a new product, "Buzz". Quite apart from the annoyance of having this thing I'd never heard of become part of my email, there is another problem. One which is more real, than just having things I don't specifically care about become part of my inbox.

It's opt out. Worse, it seems to be opt out, only after one has opted in.

Worse yet, it automatically gives one's "most frequent contacts" access to all sorts of data. Big deal right...? That's the people one has the "most contact" with, so they must be trusted friends, right? People one would want to share everything with.

Right. It might be one's boss. It might be any number of people who just send a lot of mail which; because they are stalkers, get ignored. It might be any number of people, and they might not be people one chooses to share the same things with.

Fuck You Google

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.

My other most frequent contacts? Other friends of Flint’s.

Oh, also, people who email my ANONYMOUS blog account, which gets forwarded to my personal account. They are frequent contacts as well. Most of them, they are nice people. Some of them are probably nice but a little unbalanced and scary. A minority of them — but the minority that emails me the most, thus becoming FREQUENT — are psychotic men who think I deserve to be raped because I keep a blog about how I do not deserve to be raped, and this apparently causes the Hulk rage.

Worse... the only way to block (though not, it seems block, more like tell to go away for a little while, is to opt in. If one doesn't play the game, one can't control who has access to your information.

For me, I don't think this is a real problem. I don't use any of the other features of gmail (not true, I have started to use the calendar... but it has things like my Ethics Class, and the occaisional party at my place; if it gets out, well; those aren't things which were all that secret to start with. A good hit-man/stalker would have found them by other means), so my reader comments are non-existent.

But this is the wrong way to do it. My information, is mine if I want to share it, then I share it. If I don't want to share it Google (or facebook, or MySpace, etc.) shouldn't be doing me the "favor" of sharing it for me.

Because there are people I don't want to share it with, and the algorithms for that, are different for each of us. It's our life to share, or not. Not Google's.

(some other people talking about this)

Business Insider

The_xtina

Lifehacker

MSNBC

Comments

[onyxlynx]

The other question that comes up for me (the first is "Why do social networking schemes want to replicate the high school experience?") invokes a triggering image, so I'll set it aside for now, but, no, apparently nobody on the development end has any idea that the world is not nursery school and that many, or more probably most of us have privacy concerns.

Which reminds me...OK, still really hard to find.;-)

[calimac.livejournal.com]

I'm a little bit confused here. Have they automatically opened a "Buzz" account for everyone with a Gmail address, or do you have to sign up?

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

So far as I can see, everyone who has a gmail account, is now a part of Buzz.

Which is a nuisance, since most people who who google services, link them to their gmail account.

[harimad.livejournal.com]

I keep finding reasons that justify my general reluctance to deal with certain companies, and for extreme care to keep personal details off the web.

According to the old saw I could still be paranoid, but it sure seems that they *are* following me.

[feonixrift.livejournal.com]

I have a gmail account but, as yet, no buzz - I checked. Perhaps this is because I already had a profile and had it set to private? This is all too complicated.

[wetdryvac.livejournal.com]

This seemed pretty awful, so I checked it out.

1) I opted into Buzz.
2) I checked to see what was being shared. As it turns out, I have some followers, but all my stuff which might have been shared, things associated with google (calendar, twitter, picasa, etc.) appears not to be shared. I have the option of sharing it, but when I show up initially, the default (even though buzz showing up in my gmail once I've opted in, and deciding whom I might like to follow is ugly) doesn't appear to default share anything.
3) I ran their add tool to be sure, and it offers to default add picasa and google reader to what I share - but I can cancel out and not share any of that.

So, I don't appear to have been sharing anything, and am not currently sharing anything, even without changing a single setting. As nearly as I can tell, any of my contacts can follow me if I do choose to share, unless I deliberately exclude them, which is a pain - but it's not the huge security hole in my life I thought it might be.

I then tried to follow a testing account which has its own calendar, youtube, etc associated with it before opting it into Buzz. It too appears to not be default sharing anything before opting it into Buzz.

Doesn't mean Buzz wasn't initially default sharing, or that Google didn't bugger this up properly at the outset - but it appears to be default non-sharing now.

[wetdryvac.livejournal.com]

Ah, I see what people are complaining about. Reader and Picasa public posts are shared automatically. That was a *lot* of runaround to figure that out - it appears if I have some stuff locked down in my primary account (outside of buzz) it doesn't get shared but things I haven't locked down (outside of buzz, using the test account's settings) are shared by default.

That *is* a huge hole - I just had to find an account I'd not meticulously secured other access points to before.

What a mess.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

At the bottom of your gmail screen there is an option to turn Buzz off. Click that.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Part of the problem, from the reports, is that turning Buzz off, doesn't remove your stuff from being public. It just stops you from getting announcements.

[pnkrokhockeymom.livejournal.com]

Is this true? This is a real problem for me, particularly as regards this livejournal, and I may need to entirely abandon gmail because of it. Am now slightly panicked.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

That's what Fugitivus reports. I don't know, because I've not 1: Blocked anyone. 2: Got anyone I can think of who would try to get around the block.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Well, crap. That's incredibly annoying. I don't want to fuck around with Buzz to stop it from being invasive!

[integreillumine.livejournal.com]

Check this out for help: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10451703-2.html

Also, today due to whiplash Google says they're *going to* change (some of) it:
http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/13/google-buzz-privacy-update

[zeeth_kyrah]

At the bottom?? I was looking in my settings pages, where it damn well ought to be if it's part of Gmail!

[joshuwain.livejournal.com]

Wait a sec. I used the link at the bottom of "Buzz" to "Turn Off Buzz". Now it's gone.

So, are you saying that now I have to turn it back on, make some other changes, and then turn it back off again? I don't even see a place where I can turn it on again!

[athenais.livejournal.com]

There's still a link to Buzz at the bottom of your regular Gmail page which will allow you to turn it back on. So you can kill it dead, dead, dead! Or as dead as us poor-saps users are allowed to kill it.

[redbird]

This does not make me feel any better about how much of my personal life is over there, not because I use gmail, but because one of my partners does. (I do use gmail, mostly as a place to stash or receive the occasional large file, and as a backup place to send things I want to be sure of access to while traveling. The only messages I have sent or received on gmail in the last month had to do with a woodpecker.)

[soul-diaspora.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the heads up. I use the old version of gmail (https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=1&ov=1) and I'm trying to figure out whether I'm vulnerable to this or not.

I think it's safe to say "don't be evil" has gone by the wayside.

There is this link that might be helpful

[charisstoma.livejournal.com]

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10451703-2.html

In case you have not seen this.