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Comment by waterlesscloud | Hacker News Reader

This is the sort of thing that was absolutely predictable.

If you are certain that this was absolutely predictable, you are implying either:

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.

(b) is almost certain. I have trouble believing no one at Google thought, "I have people in my email contacts I don't want to share with on Buzz." They probably thought that these cases would be in a tiny minority, and that they could respond to complaints with pointers for how to block people.

Agree that (b) is almost certain.

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.

What if Google just starts buying stuff for you and having it shipped to your house. You can opt-out once it arrives -- if you can figure out the RMA process...

You're probably right but what would make them think this would be a tiny minority? Have these engineers never had ex-girlfriends?

Sane people don't have excessive drama with their exes.

Sane people don't make accounts to troll anti-google posts. And who said anything about excessive drama: do I really need to list the myriad reasons why one wouldn't want email to automatically "follow" exes and vice versa?

Clearly this is an edge case though; you cant protect against every eventuality!

Sane people do not always have sane exes.

So you say that a team of engineers does not understand that most frequent contacts != those whom I wish to share my stuff with? Are edge cases like the original post hard to predict? Did they do any testing, even with their friends/colleagues?

That doesn't sound smart to me. Either their incentives are misaligned (b) or there are some other problems.

buzz was internally available at Google for a few months before launch, so yes there was testing.

If it was a 'work' gmail account, it is quite possible that the people in their frequent contacts, are people they normally share related information with so the question didn't really come up.

Another possibility is that they assumed people would simply disable and that would solve the issue. It turned out to be an incorrect assumption.

I can attest that your first presumption is true. My girlfriend works at Google and internally it's not that big a deal to share information to your most frequent contacts, since you're generally not doing anything inappropriate or private on the internal corporate network anyway.

c) http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/s/SNAFUprinciple.html

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.

There are other options available. What almost certainly happened here is that Google was so concerned with getting the features right that they pushed it out without asking "What could go wrong?"

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.

I know it was absolutely predictable because c), I predicted it. About 20 minutes into using Buzz. I posted on my Buzz, in fact, that I was waiting to see the resulting mess.

So yes, I'm certain that it was.

Exactly so: if you put your address and other contact information online, people will find it.

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.

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