Automatically followed by abusive ex-husband (and his friends) on Google Buzz
fugitivus.wordpress.com
fugitivus.wordpress.com
Or at least thats how Google looks to the public these days. If thats the perception they want, they got it.
I think this Buzz privacy fiasco is an historic lesson in the convergence of humanity and software and the lesson learned is that privacy of personal relationships should be a fundamental right
If, on the other hand, Google had said "heres our new Google Buzz feature, heres how to turn it on, heres the privacy settings and heres how you can add everyone|people you talk to regularly|manually add" then I'd be perfectly happy. Opt in is better than opt out, as far as privacy is concerned.
To the best of my knowledge they prompt you and ask you who you want to follow. This was the case for me. They don't automatically follow - unless you click the OK button.
Turning off buzz is literally one click away at the bottom of the screen. I know because I used it.
This is also shown in the Google buzz demo video.
Responsibility lies on you when you decide not to edit the follow users and check privacy setting when its right in front of you the first time. The only way forward is to click OK, thats what you did like everyone else who is complaining and going ra ra about privacy.
Upon proceeding in to Gmail, I found that I was participating in Buzz, with IIRC 14 follows.
My more general reaction to this situation, including a similar, serious security implication for a close family member, I'll comment on elsewhere in this thread.
Briefly: You fucked up bigtime, Google. The people truly responsible for this need to be terminated.
I didn't watch the Google Buzz demo video, because I'm not interested in Buzz. I shouldn't have to watch something I'm not interested in to find out how not to take part in what I'm not interested in. It also took me quite a while to figure out where the turn off button was - since its not in the normal settings, where I would expect to find such things.
There were already messages there. They were almost all about how to turn off buzz.
Clearly you have option to edit your followers list and change privacy setting (which was the complain I was referring to). If you choose not to do anything about that and ignore the prompt and go ahead click OK. Should you not take some responsibility for it? I am not denying that google auto following is not in bad form I am just pointing out that changing/editing it is extremely easy and right in front of you.
As for turning off buzz. It is at the bottom of your gmail window. One click away, but not obvious.
Oh right, "we don't like his comment, let's get rid of it." Jesus, people, behave.
He's making his case based on his knowledge of the situation and he's doing so in an educated manner.
Me, personally, I'm in his same situation. I can't understand how people got automatically added to that Buzz thing. The link appeared in my Gmail account and I never clicked it, NEVER. I just turned it off when I learned how.
So, I go back to what I was saying: did anyone using the privacy settings available have their privacy setting explicitly overridden, or was is just people not using the privacy settings available, and then getting run over when they realized what they had allowed opened?
Edit: I get downvoted for asking questions. Apparently, not following the torch-bearers blindly is frowned on.
What, exactly, should they have done to keep this from happening?
Edit: And because it needs to be said here: I'm not suggesting enabling Buzz and then using existing privacy settings as a bases for how Buzz works is right. I'm just asking a question.
They are both Reader users, and did have limited sharing enabled there, but under what logic should those permissions ever extend to a completely new, different service with wholly different privacy concerns?
From this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1121034
Anyways, here is my take. Buzz isn't a new product so much as it's a new feature of Gmail. It's as much a new product as any new feature of Gmail is. It's also tied into most of the areas Gmail is, and tied into the rest of Google, and uses Google Profiles.
Google made the assumption that because this wasn't so much a complete new product, but rather an extension to an existing one, that it should use existing permissions. And looking at it that way, I can easily see them doing what they did.
What they didn't suspect, or expect I'm sure, is that people would see it not as a Gmail feature, but rather as a completely different system unrelated to Gmail and rather, tacked onto it.
I can see how Google looks at Buzz as merely an extension to Gmail. Gmail is, after all, their communications tool, including email, chat, and eventually (we know this is coming), Wave. Buzz is merely another way to communicate, and because so much of Gmail already includes so many other connections, Buzz being a framework to share things that Email, Chat, and what not are effective at, they built it with a familiar way of doing things. They then assumed (and I'm assuming all of this, mind you) that because they were building on top of an existing structure, that much of the privacy concerns that have arisen were already in use by the people that were concerned with it.
So, the question is, not whether Google was right or wrong, but rather, where do we draw the line? When does a new feature become a new product that requires new permissions, and when is a feature merely a feature that can use existing permissions. After all, there is so much that they do add where we don't blink an eye or concern ourselves with permissions or privacy, despite the potential for problems down the line.
I understand what they did, and why they did it (if my assertions are correct). However, there is more to learn here than to just say "Make everything private." The reality is, most users make assumptions about privacy (this is excellent proof of that), and so do companies. I honestly don't think Google went with Buzz and said "Let's destroy users privacy." I also hope this heightens people's awareness to the state or privacy on the web.
This is the question: if up until now, you had an option that set things to 'public', but they weren't really public, should a new feature unset your previous choices? Should a new feature change your privacy settings?
That's exactly what happened to me. I'm really pissed off with Google now. If they are going to throw this sort of crap at me, I will have to reconsider whether I want gmail and reader accounts.
The way to turn it off is a very small textual link in the footer of the page that says turn off buzz.
I doubt the google programmers are stupid but I would say that they probably were excited by the new feature that they are proud of and didn't think that people would want to opt out of it before even trying it.
(since it didn't seem to come through when the other guy posted it)
Important quote from http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10451703-2.html
"But all this does is remove active links, leaving your profile still publicly available, along with any public buzzes you might have made while trying Buzz out. In fact, you're still technically following people, and they're following you. Not OK."
We can't have two-sided conversations in HN anymore. Either you bash Buzz/Google or get the hell out of this thread.
Basically, what is happening is the same thing that happens at twitter by default. People follow other people, and followers, NOT contacts, are shared. People can see who is following you, but they can't see your contacts.
So, when someone joins Buzz, Google suggests they follow certain people, and sets them up. These are people they have in their contacts list. These people in turn have also done the same thing, most likely. Followers, like on Twitter, are shared publicly.
Basically, a lot of people were following people when they really didn't want to be, and despite the ability to prevent it, they accepted the defaults.
Google has made changes to make it more obvious, but from my own experience, and from everything I've read, seen, or done, is that this was all preventable. The problem was, people didn't take the time to read, or understand, what was happening, just happily clicking along.
Of course, that's probably just as dangerous. Should Google have handled it differently? Yes. Did they betray users privacy? Possibly, depending on if you accept that users using software have a certain level of responsibility, or that the software is supposed to assume you don't know what you are doing.
Edit: More information this morning, and I feel vindicated. =)
I set up a profile on one account ahead of time. This was very easy to do; Google Reader encourages it at various places.
When I logged into GMail and got the "Buzz" welcome screen, it offered "Try Buzz" and "No thanks." I clicked "No thanks" and it took me to GMail, but the Buzz UI was enabled anyways. When I logged into second account that was a contact of the first, it received a notification that the first account was following the second, with a link to the first account's profile and list of followees/followers.
Now, this part is a bit foreign to many people, but imagine that the fact you email someone is a secret and potentially damaging to you. Maybe you are a whistleblower talking to a government regulator. Someone I know had a stalker added to their Buzz followers along with people she didn't want the stalker to learn about (because stalkers will try to get at their victims through their friends and family). Maybe you don't want certain people aware of your sexual orientation, or your religious or political activities.
At this point, the damage is already done. Before Thursday night, there was no clear notification or way to opt-out of the public followers list until after it had been created and then broadcast to a list of people. By the time you got around to checking out Buzz, realizing that your information had been disclosed, and figuring out how to remove it, it could easily be too late. Note that Google did not "suggest" people to follow and then let users "accept" these defaults. They were added without the user's knowledge or consent.
Worse, if you found the "Turn off Buzz" link in the GMail footer and clicked it before blocking your followers, changing your profile settings, etc., then all your information is still public but hidden from your GMail pages! It's then much harder either to discover the problem or to fix it.
And Google has admitted to some outright bugs that made the situation worse for the "Fuck you Google" blogger. For example, people still appeared in the "Following you" list on Google Reader even after they were blocked and you set your Reader shared items to private; they couldn't actually see your shared items then but it appeared to the user that they could. Also, before Thursday there was no way to block a user who did not have a public profile.
My friends who work at Google are convinced these are real problems[1]. I think you are dismissing them way too quickly.
[1]: http://www.google.com/buzz/mbrubeck/HEN2DyJooNZ/This-looks-l...
First, I stand by what I said: People need to be aware, and made aware, of these things. Privacy is your business, and putting my privacy in the hands of someone else (and I'm not even referring to Google here) means I'm essentially giving up my privacy. Whistleblowers and other people who wished to remain secret should have taken more steps to ensure their privacy (accounts that can't be traced back to themselves).
Secondly, you don't make it clear whether either account said it auto-followed things before you logged in or not. Did it? Did Account 1 follow Account 2 without actually logging in with Buzz enabled, or was it only after logging in it auto-followed? Note: I realize the implications of either way; however, I'm just curious to know which it is for my own knowledge. Again, I'd rather not assume. You also make it seem as if you accepted the default privacy settngs Google set for you.
Next, I realize their were bugs in Reader that "Fuck you Google" made them aware of. Bugs happen. In this case, the bug was just a display bug and from my understanding, didn't actually share anything. In this case, the big problem was merely a display problem. Sure, this is a bug, and a serious one, but not the extent that anyone was suggesting.
Finally, everything I've seen from Google, including the link you sent, suggests that they had these settings in before hand, and that the privacy concerns were more from people that didn't look into the privacy settings before hand and accepted the defaults. The link you posted even described all the issues you described by fixing them merely through making them more visible.
So again, we come to it: The settings were made available. That they weren't flashing and in front of the users with big bold text with sound announcing themselves is a problem, but not to the same extent that "Google was display user's contact lists on their profile page."
However, that all being said, I still think we can learn a lot by this. But looking at it through the eyes of the mob-think that occurred these past few days won't teach us anything, and if anything, only promotes continued ignorance of privacy concerns on the internet.
Companies are not human, certainly not by default. The vector sum of the effort of many humans is inhuman by default. [1] (Phrases like "mob mentality", "team spirit", and "groupthink" didn't get invented for nothing.) It takes hard work to give a company a human face -- hard work by management, by PR, by customer support, by HR. Some companies are much better at such work than others.
---
[1] This is, of course, a perennial topic here on HN: It's easier to run a human company when the company has fewer people. That's one of a startup's advantages.
Of course, a company that is too small runs the risk of being too human: Humans, for example, are prone to emotional roller-coastering, can become fixated on the trees instead of seeing the forest, and need at least some sleep every day. A team's inherent "inhumanity" can help smooth out misfeatures like this.
'Similar to Facebook being willing to "piss its users off" when it feels the need to make a big change in its service for the long-term good, I see Buzz in Gmail as a relative big change that requires more than one day to adjust to. We've all been on the side of changes in services that we didn't like and either got used to or actually loved in the long run. We think Buzz is one of them. A lot of us here have also been designers on a service that we knew needed to change but was afraid to because of internal momentum or fear of short-term user reactions.'
edit: I think the quote stands on its own. They may be horrified, but the action was rooted in a kind of arrogance we often ascribe to inhuman activity, where the impact on other humans wasn't considered thoughtfully or was deliberately ignored.
Thinking about this, it seems like Google and Yahoo have been really envying what is effectively Facebook's captive audience. With Facebook, you sign up for "social networking" is essentially an undefined product whose provider has undefined obligations to you.
Email involves some explicitly or implicitly understood bounds and so doesn't let the provider sell it users to the same degree - well, unless the email provide just flagrantly violates their implicit obligations - and so the temptation is greater and greater.
If you've ever dealt with Google "technical support" (even if you're a customer who shovels them buckets of cash each week) you'll find that it's nearly impossible to reach an actual human being who can help you.
Convoluted as it is, getting a blog post ranked top in Hacker News seems the easiest (only?) way to get a genuine Google issue addressed. I hope they address this one AND create an actual means of contacting the people who are supposed to be running the place.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/05/a-googler-has-his-tiananmen...
Seems like a bunch of geeks with autism that fail to understand that what they do in people's mail affect them enormously, is not a game, and you should ask them. People understanding 101.
Seems like this mathematical and logical geniuses are relationships retarded.
Plenty of people at Google have to have thought this through, but decided the benefits to adoption of the current process outweigh the privacy problems that will happen to some people. That's pretty evil in my book...
"User! Answer this question! Now!"
Our user generally doesn't really care about your new feature if they're logging in to check mail; they want to--wait for it--check their mail. Just like users everywhere, they're just going to click on a random button and not even be able to tell you five seconds later whether it said "Go Away" or "Reveal My Location To My Abusive Ex-Husband And All His Friends".
[edit:formatting]
Neither Gmail nor Yahoo are strictly email anymore. If you believe they are are, you're living in a fantasy world. Both have chat, and yahoo even has stuff like calendar and notes. "Webmail" isn't strictly email and it hasn't been for years.
"Reveal My Location To My Abusive Ex-Husband And All His Friends"
What all of the rabid people like you fail to realize is that no information was actually revealed to anyone in this instance. It was a combination of her misunderstand and a bug in google reader that displayed follower/following lists wrong.
Of course, none of you actually care about the facts, you just want to complain.
Don't be evil, indeed.
And "opt in" is hardly a new concept.
This was totally preventable, through a well-worn paradigm of customer engagement.
Google has no excuse for this. They were greedy, and they screwed their customers, big time.
The only real conclusion I can draw is that they just didn't care. Sort of "We're Google, we have vast amounts of data, and we'll do whatever the hell we please with it, and if you have a problem, talk to the hand." I've been given the Google hand to talk to before (most people using AdSense have) and this is really getting to be a problem.
And yeah, I'm a freelancer, and yeah, I sometimes use Gmail, and yeah, it's not really a Good Thing for business if my customers can see each other. I'm not in danger of being raped by any of them, mind you, but this just doesn't seem to fall under the aegis of "don't be evil".
If anything, I'd say it makes you human.
I don't have a Google Profile, I said no thanks when Gmail asked me if I wanted to try Buzz, and I clicked "turn off buzz" at the bottom of gmail. Can anyone tell me if people can follow me in Buzz? Or if I'm following anybody?
I have been clicking around in Google and I have no idea how to control this and I don't want to turn Buzz on by accident...
Rant:
The terrible thing is, I didn't give Buzz another thought until all this negative publicity turned up. Now I'm sitting here very paranoid that Google is misusing information about me. And I'm wasting a lot of time trying to figure out what it is or isn't doing. I resent having this fear and I am annoyed that my lack of confidence that "No Means No" leads to wasting time on Google.
You can definitely add me to the list of people who believe Google is the new Microsoft. They have hired some of this generations' best and brightest for what? To find new ways to spray ad feces on the Internet, to kowtow to oppressive regimes up to the moment when they realized they were being back stabbed, and to treat privacy as a quaint and archaic notion.
Worst of all, from the perspective of the HN community, they seem to be acting like the Microsoft of old: Instead of indexing information, they want to own it themselves, which is why they roll out services like Buzz directly competing with Twitter, Foursquare, Friendfeed, Facebook, and so on.
It's a sad day for Google when I start to sympathize with Rupert Murdoch. But now I understand why he wasn't rushing to embrace how Google would add value to his news businesses.
I hope I'm mistaken about this, it would seriously suck http://rot13.com/index.php?text=fhpx%20tbng%20qvpx if your profile is the key to broadcasting news about you to everyone in your (automatically generated) address book including who is frequently mailed or mailing you.
But I did not see any indication that any of my contacts were auto-following me, or me them.
On another Gmail account, for which I have no profile, I signed in and was greeted with the Try out buzz? splash thing. I clicked "No thanks."
I get to my mail page, and there's the buzz icon right under Inbox. That's a real WTF moment. I clicked the Buzz icon, and it appears no different than on my other account (except here I was not following anyone, and no one was following me). So, I have no idea what that initial splash page was for.
However, back in my main Gmail account, I used Buzz to search for that other account. Not found. But I have no idea what that really means. Is it not found because there is no profile? Not found because I didn't really opt in?
There must be particular kinds or sets of data that are exposed by Buzz, and I must not have contributed anything to those corpi. Some particular things that don't seem to have been made public via Buzz: my gmail contact list; any of my email, sent or received; Google Groups postings; any Google Chat conversations; nothing about or from my Google Wave account; Google Reader subscribed feeds.
I edited the list of people that Buzz automatically followed on my behalf and un-followed all of them.
I edited the list of apps whose status changes would be automatically Buzzed ( like Picasa ) and removed them.
Then, I deactivated Buzz again.
I suspect that I'm going to have to repeat this process periodically.
Oh wait, that's exactly what it is like, because they did the exact same thing with the launch of GChat: pre-populated social graph. No outrage then about people being able to listen to the sound of silence.
Reader privacy settings can be changed at https://www.google.com/reader/view/?tab=my#friends-manager-p...
It's just like the Facebook Newsfeed debacle. People tend to have an expectation of "how public" something is on a scale, and when that changes suddenly it can be a bit jarring. Ultimately, people adjust -- but it's a mistake to look at public/private as a binary concept. In many people's minds, it is a sliding scale.
I turned off Buzz because I don't see a value in it for me, but before that I had to search to figure out how to make it so that my contacts were not made public. I was a little irate because it represented a significant portion of my client list which is more than a little bit frustrating.
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/millions-of-buzz-users... (item # 1)
They are certainly responsive to these issues, however the fact is their approach to privacy was confusing from the start, which is a recipe for disaster.
a) The Google Buzz people are so stupid that they couldn't have predicted this absolutely predictable thing (no one else did that I know of until it bit them) or
b) they knew this would happen and chose to allow it to happen in the bad times hoping the love they'd get from those who like it would be greater than the pain experienced by those to whom it happened.
If either (a) or (b) is true, can we trust Google with our private information? Either they are too dumb to keep it out of the wrong hands or they don't care about individuals' privacy.
Google had the decision to jump-start their social network in a big way at a cost of annoying maybe 1 in 100 gmail users who are conscious about this sort of thing. Seems like an obvious decision to a for-profit company.
It raises questions in my mind about what data I am providing to Google and what unforeseen ways they may decide to use that data at some future point.
That doesn't sound smart to me. Either their incentives are misaligned (b) or there are some other problems.
Another possibility is that they assumed people would simply disable and that would solve the issue. It turned out to be an incorrect assumption.
Generally speaking, it is difficult for useful information to flow in organizations. Most of the time, this lack of circulation is not remarkable, but this looks like a big deal to me, the sort of thing that gives PR people nightmares. I would wager that at least one Buzz engineer raised this concern weeks if not months ago but was ignored or pressured into backing down.
A lot of startups do that and most of the time they're fine because they can learn as their user base grows. But Google made a strategic decision to bind Buzz to Gmail and that is what caused the problem.
The lesson is that a lot of people are thoughtless when building technology but once you get to the size of Google you can no longer afford to be as lax as everyone else.
So yes, I'm certain that it was.
I started off agreeing with her complaint, but it suddenly struck me: she's trying to avoid an abusive ex-husband - why on Earth did she even put that information in her Google profile to start with?
I have estranged family members, which is exactly why I don't put that sort of information in online profiles, and I'm not even worrying about an abusive husband who has my email address.
"Technology Shouldn't Give Big Brother a Head Start" Bruce Schneier http://www.schneier.com/essay-281.html
"I will offer you free web hosting, with some PHP doodads; and you get spying. For free." Eben Moglen http://www.isoc-ny.org/?p=1338
That said, the way Buzz was introduced was definitely a leap in the wrong direction by Google.
Thanks Google, for storing someone else's credit card for someone else's services on my account, for no reason I can find, other than the obvious 'I didn't realize what account I was signed in with', which seems unlikely because their Google Apps account was created before I ever started working there.
Man, Google's getting more and more confusing. It's a giant labyrinthine maze of data that only they have the time and processing power to sort through.
Not even they have the time and processing power to sort through it.
Stay anonymous. Use your ISP's email. Use accounts you pay for and can hold accountable for transgressions like this.
You give your data freely to google without understanding the terms of that transaction and they will use those rights in some way you arn't happy with.
She should cancel all of her google accounts and move somewhere that gives more favorable terms of service and is directly accountable to her.
Simply put, Google can NOT afford to have public opinion turn against their opt-out model. Their whole vision depends on opt-out.
But think about what a week or two of stories like this will do. Opt-out will become synonymous with evil. Then how dows Google Book's stance to authors look? How do all their other auto-data collection techniques look?
Google depends on opt-out to their very core, down to robots.txt.
They can't afford public opinion to turn against that, and it's going to if they don't move fast.
People who feel harmed by this will be upset and will hopefully understand that they were far more vulnerable than they believed, then take steps to insure that it doesn't happen again.
Some people will feign indignation at whats happened to her, claim to be boycotting google, then abandon the prospect when they see how much of a pain it is to change to another service.
Most people will never hear about this, and if they do, they won't really care. GMail works for them, they don't understand or care about their privacy. They have a service that works and is implied to be free.
[1]: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/millions-of-buzz-users...
When you skip those terms of service, you're agreeing to those terms.
You also always have the choice not to tollerate them. Move away from their service. Don't use google for search. They track every search that you perform tied against your IP.
If your privacy matters, take the time to protect it.
You can't give away information and expect it not to be acted upon. Corporations are not bound by anything except for the law and the contract they form with you. If it's within their rights, they can and will act upon it.
The second is that all the people that frequently contact HER (via an anonymous account which forwards to her Google account) now have her personal Gmail account and are following her on Buzz (and Google Reader), which she can't stop from happening.
The problem is that Google's assumed that anyone with whom you correspond frequently is a friend with whom you're willing to share all of your data, when in reality a lot of people are forced to correspond with people whom they don't like at all, and that Google shouldn't be saying 'Hey, we've created a new thing called Buzz, and we've told everyone all about you on your behalf!'
Edit: also worth mentioning: you don't 'make someone a contact' in Gmail, Google does it for you automatically whenever you e-mail someone. Also, she didn't give Google information that they were in a relationship, Google just did this automatically. Even people that she e-mailed from an anonymous address via gmail got access to her profile. Google basically gave everyone her personal info without asking if it was ok, and now she can't take it back.
Until now, hiding your mail address from spam was one of the biggest concerns one had with email. Now, that might turn into hiding from Google. Or at least circumventing where we don't want it to do something with our private data we do not agree with.
That might turn out to be hard.
A user signs up for email from gmail. They don't sign up for "networking". Whatever the fine print might be, it would be clear to her and to any neutral judge that she didn't ask to have Google give her information to her contact.
You ISP is the least anonymous email provider available. They know exactly who you are, where you live, and can see everything you do online.
Your ISP knows all the things you say they do, but so far as I know, no ISP does the kind of social/networking stuff with your information that Facebook, Yahoo, Google and company do. A government agency can get information from your ISP, but your ISP doesn't "share" anything through default-to-yes things like Buzz. (I may be wrong about this. Some ISPs may do this too.)
And let's say you had a bad client one day who wouldn't pay and you wanted to not deal with him. Well guess what -- he now has contact access to many of your other clients through the default settings in Buzz.
Heck, I was even seeing profiles out there where I could get access to someone's doctor.
I also dislike that when Buzz has a message and says (1) beside it, so does my Inbox too. I think the two should be distinctive. I ended up having to make a rule to trash anything going to my inbox beginning with "Buzz:".
I've been migrating away from Google lately; the prospect of this just hurried me right along.
Maybe it was some sort of skunk-works project that got out without sufficient oversight?
So much for do no evil...
Google, I think, did a very good job of building trust and enthusiasm with nerds; it's super important for them, we are the influencers here. Sure, nerds never click on ads, but who do you think sets up the computer for the confused normals who do?
The number of nerds I know who hate google to the point of using inferior search engines is growing over time.
I distinctly remember to have clicked in something like "I want to use buzz" before having it enabled
Gmail keeps track of your correspondents and automatically nominates them to be your social circle, which is way out of the scope of this girl's usage and requirements for and e-mail client. What she wanted was web-based anonymous e-mail, and Google didn't help her out there much.
They (claim to) use some sort of asymmetric encryption scheme such that they literally do not have access to the data on their own servers. I'd love to have a crypto expert explain to me if it's legit.
Anyway, there is more than just your e-mail: there is your connection logs, the quantity of messages you receive (and from whom), retrieve (and when) and sent (and to whom).
Plus, the relevant authorities could compel them to surrender your logs. You may prefer that they (have to) ask you directly. (EDIT: Vivtek says this happens very rarely, if you care do ditch the logs, so this may be a small issue.)
I don't think we can get closer to truly anonymous web based mail. That may be sufficient for most people, though.
I should probably reinvigorate that someday.
When you signed up for Gmail and Reader accounts, you thought you were getting email and RSS, and you acted differently than you would for a twitter account. For Google to suddenly invert those expectations is jarring and unwelcome, and to expose personal information derived from activities undertaken with particular expectations in place is a complete betrayal of trust. I still can't believe how stupid Google was about this.
The parent comment missed the fact that before you were sharing links, here you are sharing the list of people you email frequently or chat with, which is an entirely different proposition and was handled poorly in a misguided attempt to imitate your twitter "following" list.
Except for that oversight on the list of people you are following, the Google sharing model for items you share is much more advanced than Twitter or Facebook, and makes it easy to share things with a particular group of people.
Integration with Android and Picasa make things even worse: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31322_3-10451428-256.html
Plus, you can easily inadvertently expose other people's private email addresses because of their incredibly stupid ui: http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/11/reply-google-buzz-exposing-...
You also would see the names of people that would comment on the items of people you were following in Reader, even if you weren't following them. So, I definitely see your point about names, but there were cases in Reader where this was already happening.
In any case, I turned on Buzz almost right away. I got to the first step and decided I needed to turn around and clean up my contacts list, I then turned it on. That could have easily been designed into the activation process.
So, in fact, this is an opportunity to say "thank you" to the hackers out there that tinker with and attempt to break (sorry - "improve") everything as soon as they can get their hands on it. You make the world a better place.
http://savedelete.com/discover-how-to-do-use-google-buzz-and...
(posted yesterday by yogeshmankani: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1118141 )
> We reached out to blogger in question this morning and addressed her concerns with Google Buzz and Google Reader. Some of the concerns were due to confusion the product experience created. Her report also helped us discover one bug and one product issue in Google Reader:
> 1) If you block people in Buzz, they still show up as following you in Reader. This is a bug, and we're working to fix it. Provided that your Google Reader shared items are protected, only the people you've explicitly allowed to see them can do so -- regardless of who appears to be following you in Reader.
> 2) Until now, there has not been functionality to block people from following you in Google Reader. We're adding this to the Reader interface.
> We are making these two changes as fast as possible and we'll get them live in the next few days.
Archived copy of the article in question: http://img38.imageshack.us/img38/329/harrietjacobsfuckyougoo...
If you don't like the faceless information harvesting machine Google is becoming, ditch their services. Otherwise, may as well just accept it.
Maybe if I could have easily turned it off (or if it was opt-in, of course)...
Google grossly underestimated how important privacy has become to average user in last year or two. Unfortunately this could have been the killer feature that Buzz could leverage over Facebook and Twitter because they do such a horrible job at it. In fact Facebook's take on privacy has become down right scary. Privacy controls for Buzz could have been it's differentiator. Instead it's turned into the killer mistake threatening to bury Buzz before it even got out of the gate.
But, everyone screws up, everyone makes mistakes, it's all about how fast they fix it. So get some pizza, jolt, and strong coffee it should be a long weekend Google Buzz Engineers.
I would also disagree that Facebook's take on privacy is "downright scary," given the range of privacy settings you can choose. It's not some half-assed implementation on their part. Perhaps you take issue with the default settings?
No one set of privacy options will work for everyone for any of these tools. And when you choose to use one, you're responsible for what you say and do with it. So maybe the real issue is that Google decided to enable Buzz automatically. It was a choice they made, and I don't think it was necessarily the wrong one.
The only thing the Google Buzz Engineers should be working on this weekend is removing the huge lag for posts showing up in the feed.
But, I agree with the article that Facebook is really getting it wrong. Instead of having a default how about present them with a simple dialog. Explain the issues, and ask them what settings the user wants? Share with Everyone, Share with My Friends, etc.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_zuckerberg_sa...
Then the accusations that if you or one of your friends fills out a poll your information is shared with the poll author. (As noted on Twit Podcast). So yes I think those are some scary things.
To err is human, but to persevere in error is only the act of a fool. "Cujusvis hominis est errare, nullius nisi insipientis in errore perseverare". Cicero
-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, in 2009.
We are all criminals in today's world. He understands that. He just doesn't care. He's a part of the elite that can afford lawyers and protection.
In my wildest dreams he is sued under the DMCA for making a backup copy of one of his kid's dvds.
HATE
Judgment matters... If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place... If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines - including Google - do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.
Schmidt simply suggested that if you have an extraordinarily high need for privacy you should not use Google. He's right and I agree with him. This is the CEO of a company reminding his consumers that Google has to conform to the PATRIOT Act. He's saying something that could potentially hurt his business by pointing out how your privacy is hurt because of the laws they have to comply to.
Remember the attack on Google by China a few weeks back? Where the subject lines of the email of civil rights activists were compromised? This happened because of a mechanism Google was forced to put in place to conform to federal wiretap laws. Schmidt was spot on in what he said.
We've got a strong enough case against Google without resorting to cheap tricks. What they've done with Buzz is unforgivable. I may well be migrating away from Google's services in the next week or two, depending on how this pans out.
Don't mistake my position; my only contention here is that Schimdt's quote is taken out of context. It is poor evidence of Google's stance on privacy. Let's use strong evidence like the mishandling of Buzz to make our case against Google.
A close family member has spent the past decade going to sometimes extreme measures to avoid an abusive ex-spouse.
Google has potentially pre-emptively revealed their contact information; and not through their own choices and/or lack of action (on zero notice, spending perhaps hours wandering through a plenitude of scattered and poorly documented Buzz settings and behaviors -- please!). No: Any email contact who uses Gmail is now a potential point of exposure for them.
ABSOLUTELY UNACCEPTABLE.
Stupidity can aid and abet evil, Google. If you are not purposefully evil, you are aiding and abetting it.
My trust is gone. It's not coming back.
If you want any measure of damage control, you will determine who was actually responsible for this. And everyone in a position of responsibility for this product who did not understand or chose not to heed these concerns. And you will terminate them. Anything less, and we can do no more than expect similar bad decisions -- from those same people -- in the future.
I'm not looking to defend Google's choices about Buzz. But I take exception to the idea of firing people who make bad decisions without due consideration for how those decisions came about.
It flies in the face of a mantra at HN: Fail early and often. It goes against the idea that you learn by making mistakes.
If a company fires people for making a poor decision out of ignorance, then they have just lost someone with valuable experience about a potentially troublesome choice. Now that company has to go get someone who (most likely) has not fucked up in that way. (I bet most places do not hire people who got fired from another job for fucking up.)
Who is more likely to make that same or a similar mistake in the future? The person who already fucked up and learned something, or the new person without that experience?
Some people screw up because they are innately incompetent in some field. Let them go; they will not get any better.
Others screw up because they are doing something new, or acting with incomplete or wrong information. In that case, the problem may not be the person but the situation.
Fix the conditions, don't just find a scapegoat.
When you're a young, tiny startup, you can fail early and often because the costs of doing so are outweighed by the benefit of the education you get, both to yourself and to society at large.
This is Google. It's huge, it's been around the block a few times, it's already had a ton of failures, and millions of people rely on it. It can't and shouldn't have the same latitude to fail, especially in an area as important as privacy.
All the more reason to consider what is the best course to prevent similar mistakes in the future. Knee-jerk firings may make things worse.
Some lessons don't need to be learned from experience, and some screw ups are bad enough that they should result in real consequences.
As an example of some thoughts on the latter:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1119173
And it is not a terribly challenging intellectual exercise to realize some of the implications of the product rollout as configured and executed.
Finally, having used and observed Google products for some time now, I perceive it to be yet another in an increasing cascade of decisions and behaviors that have short-shifted legitimate and often apparent security considerations. Yes, that is my opinion. So is my parent comment. Take from it what you will.
First, in my further opinion, there are "mistakes" that are simply too significant to just forgive and learn from. They demonstrate an inability of the parties responsible to carry out their duties and responsibilities. I see Buzz as such a case.
Second, Google as an institution has let various aspects that are exposed by these situations -- from effective design and execution, particularly with respect to some aspects of security, to effective customer relations -- slide for too long. If they are going to improve, it's become apparent that as an institution they are going to have to take some dramatic action. Something that communicates to their employees that the status quo will no longer do.
It's my opinion. And maybe I'm overly pissed off at the moment. But this Buzz rollout is particularly boneheaded, and Google is better off without the employees who had responsibility for preventing such a fiasco.
Google held many customers by making enough of a show about being concerned for their privacy. It's what kept me using their search results, despite the increasing tracking they've been implementing. They are at risk of losing this perception now in the public and upon the part of their customer base.
When your customers don't trust you, your other efforts at engagement run a distant second.
But then again, I'm not sure if Eric Schmidt would happily share who he's corresponding with or following with the entire staff...
Now edit your Google profile (if you have one) and remove any information that you don't want public (including "display my full name"): http://www.google.com/profiles/me/editprofile?edit=b
Finally, go to the footer of the GMail site and click "turn off Buzz."
Worst. Design Choice. Ever.
http://www.businessinsider.com/google-adding-two-privacy-fea...
Not to say that Google is blameless in this situation, as they could have done a lot more to educate potential Buzz users on privacy. However, it seems a common thread with the complains about Buzz and privacy start with someone making an incorrect assumption about how Google applications were handling their comments, shared feeds, friends, etc.
The fact that you can go back and block your "following" list from public view is irrelevant -- the list of people you exchange email with should never have been put on that list without your explicit consent. It's a unilateral change in the terms of the agreement you have with Google. Letting Google publish a list of people I follow in Google Reader is consent to publish a list of people I follow in Google Reader -- it is NOT consent to publish a list of people I email or who email me.
There are some people you don't want to follow at all, and there are some people you want to follow in private.
As a friend of mine pointed out in a recent blog post, you really don't want to make all info on all the people you follow public, especially if they're your kids: http://anwag.posterous.com/
It is a valid breach in privacy and trust. Careless on Google's part to consider that use-case.
I have a Wordpress account, but it doesn't seem to bring down the wall for me. Can you please quote an excerpt?
The shared feed included sensitive info (like where she lives) and now that secret info is available to her violent and abusive ex-spouse (and all his friends.
here's what's most confusing. there's a "google account", that can be any email address (including a google apps for your domain email). this is not the same as a gmail account, it's just a "google account". this type of account can use almost every service (except for gmail, and probably a few others), and it's a personal account. it's so distinct from your "business"/domain account, that it can even have different passwords.
then, you have your domain account. it can also access some services (like google apps), but these are all accessed through a special URL -- like mail.google.com/a/weebly.com, or calendar.google.com/a/weebly.com, etc. this is also a unique account which has its own password.
long story short: super confusing
I don't trust google anymore than I trust any individual I don't know. I am using their service, and I know that they can give up all me emails, on purpose or by accident, and I have to be aware of what I send over that service. Clearly google has done a foolish thing here, but based on the above, not one that should have been unexpected.
Such is the state of modern life. You can always shut it off.
POP3 account… with advanced features? I mean, I know they don't want to go IMAP because they don't want to store information on their servers, but it's still contradictory at first glance.
But this would be a civil case, right? There is only a Jury if its a criminal case.
EDIT: I stand corrected.
If you type "Jury trial" into bing, it #2's "in civil cases" and for that you get:
U.S. Constitution extend the rights to trial by jury
to include the right to jury trial for both criminal
and civil matters and a grand jury for serious cases
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_trial#Civil_trial_procedur...
The right to trial by jury in a civil case is addressed by the 7th Amendment, which provides: "In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law."
Though there are also details that matter. Here's one:
The right to a jury trial in civil cases does not extend to the states, except when a state court is enforcing a federally created right, of which the right to trial by jury is a substantial part.
They make no money protecting ones' privacy. If you can work your privacy into their business model, you'll have gained something. Good luck with that, though.
They're doing serious damage to their image with this. I hope they wake up soon.
While I see dubious value of automatically setting often mailing addresses to following (this should not have been the case, IMHO), I have a feeling that the much more visible follow-relationships right now might actually be an improvement to the older situation where you never really knew who was following whom, as right now, you actually have a chance to find out about it.
(also as a preventive measure: I'm not trying to troll. I understand her and I'm feeling bad for her, but I would really like to discuss whether this can't actually be some kind of a good thing as she at least knows that he's following her now)
(Here's just one of the many alternative scenarios: For every technically-sophisticated stalker who is unmasked by this change, I'll bet there are several technically-unsophisticated stalkers who didn't used to know how to stalk someone through Google, but who now do.)
Anyway, you can do all the sociological research you want, but that still doesn't make it right to manipulate someone else's personal toolset without their consent. You still have to ask. The person who does get to cherry-pick scenarios -- to steer the course of his or her life in situationally-appropriate ways -- is the customer. Unless you're a Google customer, apparently, in which case the company will change the nature of its existing tools, without fair warning, to suit its own benefit.
I do also think though that the previous setup provided security by obscurity (it was hard to stalk, but it was also hard to notice being stalked), whereas the new setup is open about that fact.
Relying on your stalker not to be technically-sophisticated seems risky.
I agree on the point of not changing existing tools, though arguably, this was a change for the better (now you see that you are being stalked and how to stop it), albeit one which could have done even better (by turning all of the existing features off, then implementing buzz and then giving people the chance to opt-in again).
Cryptographers have a principle: security-through-obscurity is no security at all. And in the world of cryptography, that's a good principle. [1] But, alas, in the world of people who are being stalked, that principle is useless -- or, rather, it is isomorphic to in the long run you are doomed. Security-through-obscurity, and its undependable, amorphous cousins like social engineering, are all that you get, assuming that you physically exist, that you can't afford to live in an armed compound, and that you can't afford (or have no legal power) to get your stalker put in a secure prison for life.
Don't force your users to give up all the pragmatic social tools that they know best, that they've developed for themselves -- their knowledge of the natures, personalities, and social norms of the people around them -- and make them live inside a math-class story problem. Such a move can literally kill them. And they won't appreciate it even if it doesn't.
---
[1] Because cryptographers study a class of problems in which this assumption makes sense and maps well to the real-world situation.
As has been pointed out here on HN, we are not the customer. The customer is the ad buyer. We are merely the sheep, here to be regularly shorn by serving ads to us and analyzing our data and networks.
As has also been pointed out here on HN, Google doesn't treat their customers (ad buyers) very well. Given that, how well would you expect them to treat the sheep?
A good reminder (or revelation) of why rape is never funny and should be taken seriously.
So at this point, her public comments are being shared with one of the people that she talks to the most. This is a problem, but it's not something Google could have avoided.
My advice is to block this person, stop commenting on blogs if it is going to endanger her life (or use real anonynimization tools), and get a restraining order against the person she fears. People are easy to get rid of if you put enough effort into it, but what I've noticed from reading Ask Metafilter (and other things) is that people enjoy having problems and don't actually want to solve them. I feel that this person is doing the same thing, "drama drama me me me".
Let the downmods begin...
All "sharing" should be based on opt-in actions and not left to being opt-out. I've fully aware that many networks including the biggies like Facebook don't follow this mantra, but personal privacy laws (such as those that exist in Canada) should exist to enforce this fact.
The rub is that I have no idea what results look like for those who don't use GReader or GProfile.
Seems OK with me. In fact, I kind of like it.
Only complaints I have are: 1. Missing tagging functionality (or I haven't found one) 2. No centralized 'privacy control panel'
Use the client of your choice to copy it to another account or download it to your computer.
It is like Google is saying - "We give you free services, so now we own all your data. And just so you know, we don't do evil - so pls don't judge."
Must be funny in the rich man's world. They are wasting away shareholders' profit share in their hubris or competitive fear.
http://lifehacker.com/5470104/google-updates-explains-buzz-p...
Now there is a block link again anyone following you (once you unfollow them).
http://mashable.com/2010/01/10/facebook-founder-on-privacy/#...
The way the Buzz settings found my contacts and added them was perfect, because I use my gmail account frequently with my friends -- I'm right in their ideal use case.
This person didn't -- either she could not have "Okayed" Buzz at all and there would be no issue, or once she saw that it added all the wrong people she could disable her sites and then not post to it.
> But it's not too hard to remove them.
> ...
> ... once she saw that it added all the wrong people
> she could disable her sites and then not post to it.
EDIT: It's not me who down-voted you because I think your comment adds value. It tells us that people think these options are OK. I think you're wrong, but I think it's important that your opinion is seen as reasonable by some. Just not me.
More effective to just leave gmail. It threads conversations and gives you a lot of storage. Other than that it's just email.
There are lots of cheap email options where the only way the provider makes money is by you paying them a small amount of it, not by sifting and analyzing the contents of your email and the relationships between your contacts and correspondents.
I could be wrong of course, but the post has way too many red flags to sound true.
Of course she's having issues. We all do. That's how it is in the real world ;) ... and some of us are extroverts, sharing our feelings with others. But it doesn't mean that if I have a message for Fred, everybody should read it ... and normal people don't know how to protect themselves, that's why this whole trend on "public by default" taken by Google and others is so worrying.
It did the same to my account, I didn't even realize it until I read the article.