… is now the sound of Google engineers furiously re-engineering Google Buzz to address the flood of privacy concerns since its launch 4 days ago.
The Official GMail blog explains that they’ve changed from an auto-follow model to an auto-suggest model, so it will suggest people you may want to follow rather than sign you up automatically.
Other changes include not automatically sharing your activity on Picasa or Google Reader, and adding a big, honking off switch to your GMail settings that will actually turn Google Buzz off, not just hide it from view.
All good things, but with many people the damage has likely already been done. Of course many others have never heard of Buzz yet and will find it with the privacy controls it should have had from the beginning.
We quickly realized that we didn’t get everything quite right. We’re very sorry for the concern we’ve caused and have been working hard ever since to improve things based on your feedback. We’ll continue to do so.
I used to work at RealNetworks, who had a huge privacy blow-up in the late 90s. After all the backlash, they toed the line, privacy-wise, but their reputation was already ruined. To this day I know people who refuse to install RealNetworks software.
Who isn’t going to think twice before joining another Google service? Mud is their name now. I bet the Buzz team members are hanging their heads pretty low in the Google cafeteria.
I wouldn’t be so sure, Free Lunch. Google has a much, much greater store of goodwill built up with the public than RealNetworks ever did. After RealNetworks blew the public trust it didn’t have the advantage of people still surfing over to it several times a day to see its big friendly name on the screen as they enter their search. It also doesn’t help that Real Audio is like a virus in the way it infiltrates your computer and for a long time was nearly impossible to completely uninstall. I sure as shit won’t install it on any of my machines, even now.
You know, Google has been down this road before and still not lost much (if any) market share. Do you remember when you could type in a phone number and Google would happily reveal whose phone number it was and their address?
Honestly it makes me wonder if they have any women in their upper echelons who contribute to these decisions. I think women tend to be more aware of the serious safety concerns these tools present; it was women who objected most loudly to the phone number experiment and it’s women who are objecting to this (see the below post about the woman whose crazy ex got to see shit intended only for her current boyfriend to see).
By the way, Anthony, “it’s launch?” Really? It is launch? It has launch?
@2 – Thanks, fixed.
Ken Auletta’s book Googled (Paul reviews it here) gives some good insight into how these things happen at Google. They really do seem to see themselves as always doing good, and they’re confused when people react badly to their missteps. As for women in management, they resisted even having management for years. It’s a company of engineers, and that’s the source of these kinds of problems.
TVDinner, you said exactly what I was going to say. Many women are more aware of these things out of necessity. I know Google has female employees, but they must not be speaking up and/or their voices are not being heard.
@3: Engineers, huh? Yeah, engineers really are a breed unto themselves, aren’t they? Thanks for the insight and the coverage of this. It’s been interesting.
Women at Google do things like figure out what shade of blue to use for….
@2, @4 and gee, here I was hoping they were hiring women engineers because they’re qualified and able, not out of deference to some bizarre binary gender stereotype.
@2 TVDinner. Tbank you for proving my point about reputation.
I don’t think Google is as immune as you think. It’s one thing to continue using a great search even if some results break other people’s privacy. It’s another to sign up for a second service when the first one published your own address book.
Google’s problem is that they automatically think “oh, my gosh, this is great, wouldn’t it be great if we could…” without thinking things through. That is kind of engineery.
This buzz nonsense has rendered gmail notifier useless–it keeps signaling that I have a message when it’s just some loose-lipped friend tweeting again. Is there a “turn this off forever” option?
More than engineers, Googlers often see themselves as computer scientists. That is, they are interested primarily in furthering the field of Computer Science for the sake of Science. The main problem, as I see it, is not that the company lacks “management,” rather that the company lacks a comprehensive computer science ethics panel or other oversight into these products prior to launch. After launch, these products come before the court of public opinion, and Google reacts.
As I understand it, Google resists traditional management in order to avoid the corrupting influence of profit-driven product development which might lead the company to abuse its frightening amount of information/power, wealth of public trust, and become truly evil. I don’t generally place much faith in the court of public opinion, but in this case Google reacted fairly quickly and may second-guess pushing mandatory “features” and “products” in the future.
@10: That bugged me too. You can make a filter for “label:buzz” to “Skip the inbox / Archive”. That should solve your problem, until the off switch appears in your preferences.
@6 That was a nice article. Thanks for the link.
Pffft. Google’s benefitting from a grand slam (advertising revenue driven by search) much like Microsoft did when it got a chokehold the OS market for PCs. Everything else is pissing around with the windfall.
@1. I’m with TVDinner. I don’t install realnetwork crap because the last time I used it sometimes in the late 90s, it infected my machine, hijacked all media playback and was impossible to remove.
I couldn’t give two shits about some social toy that I ignore but has a few people all upset about…doesn’t affect my opinion of Google in the slightest. However, being a bad application with poor etiquette (hijacking everything, acting like a virus) even once will get you on my shit-list forever.
I like Buzz.
@15 – You say tomato…
@11 – you hit the nail on the head. Google is like Microsoft in the eighties: a bunch of fully enabled kids steaming forward who’ve never made a major mistake before. Any seasoned oversight would have nipped this in the bud. A sore thumb is too mild a metaphor for how far the problems stuck out.
Mistakes are valuable lesson, of course. I’m certain every future Google project will undergo a mandatory privacy review.
@11 – the public-facing parts of Google have little to nothing to do with computer science. Glancing over their published research (http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.h…) only some of it is actual “computer science”, mostly in the “Algorithms and Theory” section (as you would expect).
For the most part, computers are to computer science as telescopes are to astrophysics.
@19 I think you mean to say they aren’t Software Engineers.
You can bang out some great algorithms or a couple thousands of lines of code, but getting your requirements and seeing your risks ahead of time is a separate discipline.