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

[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.