Who’s on Your Contact List?
According to PC World, outgoing FTC Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour slammed Google pretty hard about last month’s disastrous Google Buzz launch, referring to the situation as a case of “irresponsible conduct.”
Google users have high expectations of the company, Harbour said. “Google consistently tells the public to ‘just trust us,’” she said. “But based on my observations, I do not believe consumer privacy played any significant role in the release of Buzz.”
A reasonable consumer would conclude that the launch of Buzz was a “material change” their relationship with Google’s Gmail, she said. “When users created Gmail accounts, they signed up for e-mail services,” she said. “Their expectations did not include social networking.”
Consumers should have the “ultimate decision” to sign up for new features, Harbour added.
“The stream has become a torrent,” Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product management at Google, told me when we talked about Buzz. “This is not something we’re jumping on for the moment. It’s core to achieving our mission.”
Much like web pages became overwhelming, and where human categorization of them couldn’t keep up and got replaced by search algorithms, so Google sees social connections becoming overwhelming. That there is valuable information being shared socially, and Google’s job is to help people feel that’s organized.
Unfortunately, that ‘organization’ ended up combining some folks’ personal lives with their private ones in a breach of privacy that had many upset. Nicolas Carlson at Silicon Valley said mildly:
One big problem with Google Buzz — Google’s new social network built on top of Gmail — is that while our Gmail contact lists are full of people we actually know, they’re not full of people we necessarily want to socialize with.
More negative reactions to Buzz were the norm right after its February 9th launch. The New York Times covered several stories:
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 immediately began redefining Buzz, and finally issued a public apology admitting they “failed to appreciate that users have differing privacy expectations.”
Commissioner Harbour said that saying ‘I’m sorry’ after the fact isn’t good enough, and felt that if Google really cared about its users’ privacy, they would have been more discreet to start with. She voiced her opinion at a recent FTC privacy workshop:
“I would like to see the commission take the position of intolerance toward companies that push the privacy envelop, then backtrack and modify their offerings after facing consumer and regulator backlash.”