Whoa. Not even a week old, and Google’s public launch of social network Buzz has people up in arms over supposed privacy issues. Now, in Google’s defense, there is info there that should lead people to make the correct choices on how much info is displayed or shared, but most people don’t even realize the default settings leave them wide open for hours after they initially set up the account.
Danny Sullivan brought up some core issues on how ‘normal’ people could be inadvertent revealing more than they wanted in his post:
Still, I think Google made a mistake in automatically following people and then making those people visible by default. Google tells me there were plenty of warnings this would happen. But for myself, because I first started through the mobile version, I just don’t recall these. The first time I saw my follower list was hours later after my account had been created.
Clearly I wasn’t alone in being confused. I think part of the problem is that this is much different than how things might work for something like Twitter. Yes, at Twitter, your followers will be shown by default. But no one is selected automatically for you — and when you do add someone, you effectively review each and every person.
On lady went wild after finding out that her es husband had been included in the autofollow. Others objected to the autofollow because business contacts and friends cannot be discerned.
Google made the following statement on the Gmail blog:
We’ve had plenty of feature requests, and some direct feedback. In particular there’s been concern from some people who thought their contacts were being made public without their knowledge (in particular the lists of people they follow, and the people following them). In addition, others felt they had too little control over who could follow them and were upset that they lacked the ability to block people who didn’t yet have public profiles from following them… The first time you create a post or comment in Buzz, we ask you to create a limited public profile (at a minimum it’s just your first and last names). We do this so we’ll know what name to display next to your posts — and so the people you follow know who you are. As you do this, we notify you that the lists of people you follow and the people following you will be displayed on your public profile. You can view, edit, and even hide these lists. The lists of your followers/people you follow are not made public on your profile until after you go through this profile creation step… That said, we heard from people that the checkbox for choosing not to display this information was too hard to find, and based on this feedback, we’ve changed the notice to make it very clear. We will roll these changes out to all Gmail users later today.
For those who are freaking out, here’s the shortcut to privacy, courtesy of Nicholas Carlson at Business Insider.
