Google Buzzing your friends

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Niet fijn om je mailcontacts tot vrienden gebombardeerd zien, zonder te
vragen?
Al in the game bij Google ;)

Groet / Cees

PS. What's next? Sharing your personal details with your friends? Doe je
toch zelf ook, waarom mogen zij dat dan niet?

February 13, 2010
Critics Say Google Invades Privacy With New Service
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/technology/internet/13google.html
By MIGUEL HELFT

SAN FRANCISCO — When Google introduced Buzz — its answer to Facebook and
Twitter — it hoped to get the service off to a fast start. New users of
Buzz, which was added to Gmail on Tuesday, found themselves with a
ready-made network of friends automatically selected by the company
based on the people that each user communicated with most frequently
through Google’s e-mail and chat services.

But what Google viewed as an obvious shortcut stirred up a beehive of
angry critics. Many users bristled at what they considered an invasion
of privacy, and they faulted the company for failing to ask permission
before sharing a person’s Buzz contacts with a broad audience. For the
last three days, Google has faced a firestorm of criticism on blogs and
Web sites, and it has already been forced to alter some features of the
service.

E-mail, it turns out, can hold many secrets, from the names of personal
physicians and illicit lovers to the identities of whistle-blowers and
antigovernment activists. And Google, so recently a hero to many people
for threatening to leave China after hacking attempts against the Gmail
accounts of human rights activists, now finds itself being pilloried as
a clumsy violator of privacy.

As Evgeny Morozov wrote in a blog post for Foreign Policy, “If I were
working for the Iranian or the Chinese government, I would immediately
dispatch my Internet geek squads to check on Google Buzz accounts for
political activists and see if they have any connections that were
previously unknown to the government."

Mr. Morozov is a researcher on the impact of the Internet on
totalitarian regimes at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at
Georgetown University under a fellowship financed by Yahoo. In an
interview, he said the flap over Buzz “definitely undermines Google’s
credibility when it talks about freedom of expression.”

In an e-mail message, Todd Jackson, product manager for Gmail and Google
Buzz, said, “Google remains completely committed to freedom of
expression and to privacy, and we have a strong track record of
protecting both.”

Mr. Jackson defended the setup of the Buzz service. He said that Buzz
came with a built-in circle of contacts to provide a better experience
to users and that many liked that feature. He said that it was very easy
for users to edit who they were following on the service and who could
follow them. He also said that anyone could hide their list of Buzz
contacts with a single click.

After numerous bloggers complained that the privacy controls were
difficult to find and adjust, Google agreed to make changes. In a blog
post Thursday night, Mr. Jackson wrote that the company had made it
easier for people to hide their Buzz contacts and block followers whose
identity was unknown.

“It is still early, and we have a long list of improvements on the way,”
Mr. Jackson wrote. “We look forward to hearing more suggestions and will
continue to improve the Buzz experience with user transparency and
control top of mind.”

Mr. Jackson said Buzz had proved popular, with tens of millions of
people trying it in the last two days.

But some critics said that Google’s decision to use e-mail and chat
correspondence as the basis of a social network was fundamentally
misguided. While it is common for social networks to make public a
person’s list of friends and followers, those lists are not typically
created from e-mail conversations.

“People thought what they had was an address book for an e-mail program,
and Google decided to turn that into a friends list for a new social
network,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic
Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group in Washington. “E-mail is
one of the few things that people understand to be private.”

Mr. Rotenberg said that his organization planned to file a complaint
with the Federal Trade Commission claiming that the Google’s use of
e-mail conversations to build a social network was unfair and deceptive.

In an expletive-laden article that was widely cited on the Web, a
blogger who writes about issues related to violence against women
complained that Google had made her fearful. She said that she had
unexpectedly discovered a list of people, which may have included her
abusive ex-husband or people who sent hostile comments to her blog,
following her and her comments on Google Reader, a service for reading
blogs and automated news feeds.

“My privacy concerns are not trite,” wrote the blogger, who uses the
pseudonym Harriet Jacobs. “They are linked to my actual physical safety,
and I will now have to spend the next few days maintaining that safety
by continually knocking down followers as they pop up.”

In a further effort to contain the fallout, Google reached out to her
and made changes to enhance the privacy of shared comments on Google Reader.

Some privacy experts said that Google had made matters worse by making
it difficult for people to hide their lists of Buzz contacts after they
realized that those lists had been made public. Some users assumed that
they could simply turn off the Buzz service, but that proved inadequate.

“You want to have a simple rollback mechanism, so once things are not
what you expected them to be, you can get out quickly and not have to
play a game of Whack-a-Mole,” said Deirdre Mulligan, a privacy expert
and assistant professor at the School of Information at the University
of California, Berkeley.

Google said it was planning to address that issue soon.

Google is known for releasing new products before they are fully ready
and then improving them over time. But its decision to do so with Buzz,
coupled with its introduction to all 176 million Gmail users by default,
appears to have backfired.

“It was a terrible mistake,” said Danny Sullivan, a specialist on Google
and editor of SearchEngineLand, an industry blog. “I don’t think people
expected that Google would show the world who you are connected with.
And if there was a way to opt out, it was really easy to miss.”

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