Recklessness and lack of foresight doesn't make you inhuman. If you forwarded this post back in time to the Buzz engineers, they would try to fix it before launch -- not laugh maniacally at the thought of an innocent woman fearing for her safety.
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".
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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.
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.
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[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.
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".
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.
If anything, I'd say it makes you human.