Google tweaks Buzz social hub after torrent of complaints information from www.seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/home
This weeWhen Google unveiled Buzz, its answer to Facebook and Twitter, on Tuesday, it hoped to get its service off to a fast start by scanning the contact lists of Gmail users and automatically adding the most frequent correspondents as online friends.
But what the company viewed as an obvious shortcut stirred up a beehive of angry critics. Many users bristled at the invasion of privacy and Google's failure to ask permission before sharing personal contact lists with a broad audience, and the company has faced its own Snowmageddon of criticism on blogs and Web sites for the past three days.
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 anti-government 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 Affairs, "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."
"This is one of Google's biggest blunders," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Rotenberg said his group planned to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission alleging an unfair and deceptive trade practice.
One blogger used this example to express her outrage: "I use my private Gmail account to e-mail my boyfriend and my mother. There's a BIG drop-off between them and my other 'most frequent' contacts. You know who my third most frequent contact is? My abusive ex-husband."
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," Rotenberg said. "E-mail is one of the few things that people understand to be private."
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.
On Thursday, Google had tweaked the Buzz sign-up process to make the opt-out option clearer and made it easier to block people from following users. It also encouraged users to provide more feedback.
"We are open to improving Buzz more and to making other changes," Google spokeswoman Victoria Katsarou said.
"Among some of the future features we're considering is building a stand-alone Buzz experience in addition to the one in Gmail," Katsarou said.
Critics say Google, stung by the privacy backlash, is taking steps in the right direction, but they contend that Google should have asked for permission before automatically including contacts in Buzz.
The backlash is unusual for Google, which has substantial brand loyalty that it says comes from acting in the best interests of its users.
Rotenberg said Google might have overreached as it attempted to break into the increasingly competitive social-networking space, in which it has been outpaced and outmaneuvered by Facebook and Twitter.
"When you sign up for Facebook, you expect certain things. When you sign up for Twitter, you expect certain things. When you sign up for Gmail, you expect e-mail. So when Google turned people's e-mail contact list into their social-network friends list, they got understandably upset," he said.
