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Comment by EricBurnett | Hacker News Reader

I think the point most people are missing is that the data Google shared was already public. Reader has its own privacy and sharing policies, and as far as I can tell Buzz respects these. Even if this person successfully polices Buzz, the reader feed is still out there, public and waiting to be found.

Reader privacy settings can be changed at https://www.google.com/reader/view/?tab=my#friends-manager-p...

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Sure, but there's a huge difference between "waiting to be found" and "pushed to the foreground".

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.

If anything, Google should've learned from the Facebook debacle before releasing a News Feed of their own. Essentially, Google made the SAME EXACT mistakes as Facebook did.

They're not mistakes -- it's strategy. Google simply has the same strategy as Facebook for the same reasons.

How is it strategy when they're reverting their mistakes? Unless ofcourse screwing over a handful of people for 3 days of press buzz is considered strategy.

How are they reverting their mistakes? A few tweaks to help people opt-out? That doesn't change much. You can't monetize privacy.

I'm not sure this is entirely right. I have a public profile on Google, but it didn't announce the people that I converse with on a regular basis before Buzz (at least as far as I know).

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.

That they acknowledged as a mistake, and rectified early on. When you first turned on Buzz, there would have been an option for whether or not you wanted to have your contacts displayed, however I guess it wasn't easy to find. Shortly after releasing Buzz, they made it a lot more obvious (I guess due to user complaints):

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.

As of about an hour or so ago, it still wasn't fixed. Clicking "No, thanks" on the first Buzz popup screen means nothing - Buzz still gets enabled, still auto-populates a big list of followers and followees, and still makes that list public.

I had the same thing happen not 10 minutes ago. I logged into a rarely used gmail account, got the Buzz landing page, clicked "no thanks" and then was redirected to my inbox. Buzz was there and active and had added followers automatically.

I agree - I don't have a public profile setup, so nothing was added to buzz for me.

Thank you for pointing this out. This entire Google Buzz is infiltrating my privacy BS has got to stop.

bullshit. Google just redefined "public."

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