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Why I don’t care about Google Buzz

February 13th, 2010 (Visited 2162 times) Tags:

I don’t use GMail because I didn’t like the idea of handing over all my email and contacts to a third party company to scan and run automated processes on and potentially publish to the world. Everyone said that it was silly to worry.

Now Google has released a feature that scans and runs automated processes on your email contacts and publishes them publicly to the world. And you have to opt-out, and it is actively hard to do so.

Lawyers are one group that may not like this.

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12 Responses to “Why I don’t care about Google Buzz”

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Mark Sumerix said on February 13th, 2010 at 2:31 pm:
Actively hard? There’s a button at the bottom of the inbox webpage labeled ‘Turn off buzz.’ Voila. Buzz be gone!
wraith808 said on February 13th, 2010 at 2:48 pm:
That link just deletes the buzz tag from your gmail. It doesn’t actually opt you out- for that you have to follow the instructions at http://bit.ly/9uRj1S
Sebastian said on February 13th, 2010 at 3:29 pm:
It was sooooooooooo utterly-wtf-crazy to automatically enable ‘publicly display my followers/who I follow’. Really can’t believe they did it.
Daniel Carvalho said on February 13th, 2010 at 4:21 pm:
I must say, I was also surprised at the whole automatic following thing. I did feel somewhat violated (not too much so, but I can imagine how for others it must have been worse).

Yeah, once again, just wow, can’t believe they did that.
Dave Toulouse said on February 13th, 2010 at 4:32 pm:
I guess they took a look at things like Facebook and Twitter and figured that automating everything would just save people some time putting their lives on the web. I think I would be able to make good money by blackmailing people that willingly put stuff about themselves available.

While I agree that how it was handled is weird the most shocking part for me is that most people won’t even care about it. But then it’s shocking but not surprising …
Ernest Adams said on February 13th, 2010 at 4:57 pm:
I use (and pay for) Google Apps for E-mail. Buzz isn’t there. Maybe they realize business people aren’t going to want their professional contacts, etc. for all the world to see.
Informis said on February 13th, 2010 at 5:11 pm:
What better way to ensure people take at least one look at their new service?
Bhagpuss said on February 13th, 2010 at 5:37 pm:
I just checked mine. I have no followers, I am following no-one, I have no connected sites. I have no public profile.
We Fly Spitfires said on February 14th, 2010 at 4:20 am:
Technically speaking even your ISP that you send email through and the hosting company that gives you your email mailbox can scan and log your emails. Obviously it’s a little different from Google holding onto the information permanently and more secure because Chinese hackers seem to be drawn to Google like flies to honey but unfortunately there’s no way to be completely independant.

Still, I agree, not a fan of Buzz either so far.
Morgan Ramsay said on February 14th, 2010 at 4:58 am:
Upcoming changes to Buzz over next week to address concerns:

— Autofollow to become autosuggest.

— Disabling autoconnect to Picasa and Reader shared content.

— Adding Buzz tab in Gmail with privacy settings to include option for disabling Buzz completely.

Unfortunately, Buzz remains a component of Profile, so there’s no option to have a profile and disable Buzz.
Jesper Bylund said on February 15th, 2010 at 5:09 am:
Hopefully you did read that this was not true right?
Buzz does scan your contacts but does not publish them. Buzz also does not scan your emails.

You are right in being a bit worried about handing over this amount of information to a single company. But you should really be a lot more worried about Google Search. The indexing of the web coupled with services such as facebook means that Google already has access to every scrap of information ever listed about you either on a site or conversation between friends.
Practically, privace IS already dead. We’re all just hoping that Google doesn’t screw our lives over.
Dr. Cat said on February 17th, 2010 at 1:49 pm:
I still think “I want my privacy” is what you hear from my generation and earlier (and maybe another 10 years later). People who think giving up info about yourself exposes you from everyone from timeshare pitchmen to floods of additional junkmail and junk email all the way to trenchcoat-wearing rapists and government agencies wanting to arrest you for being subversive.

The young people today grow up knowing that if your personal and contact info is easily, promiscuously available you get invited to more parties, make more friends, and get more “hook-ups”. The prospect of people you don’t want to talk to or hear from bothering you is just part of the standard landscape, and they hopefully learn how to ignore people, so who cares if other people get your info too, right?

I think this high desire for “internet privacy” will become increasingly fringe over the next 50 years. More and more people will adopt various solutions for setting up a list/network of “the people I actually give a damn about hearing from” and pay most of their attention to that info feed, even if they also have email accounts, forums they skim/browse, etc. that are “spammed to hell”.

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