Google’s new “Buzz” raises serious privacy concerns

In February Google announced a new service that aims to compete in the social networking space, to take on the likes of Facebook and Twitter. Google “Buzz” has been initially launched for Gmail users or through a mobile phone application and aims to provide another communication method within social networks.

If you are a Gmail user then you will have seen a new option appear in your account, allowing you to share information with other contacts, including photos, videos and links, or you can follow the posts added by your chosen contacts. On mobile phones, Google “Buzz” adds the component of location to the information being shared, so that posts tagged with geographical information have an extra dimension of context.

There is an option to share information either publicly or privately, although when “Buzz” was first launched at the start if the month, the default option was set to publicly. This raised some serious privacy issues because if you didn’t edit any of the default settings after you created your profile in “Buzz”, someone could visit your profile and see the people you email and chat with most (provided you didn’t edit this list during profile creation).

This enabled Google to present users with recommended comments or links from other people that are deemed to be relevant, but without clearly indicating they will be exposing that they might be following people they don’t want the world to know they’re following. For example, a couple of unwanted scenarios would be if a wife discovers that her husband emails and chats with an old girlfriend a lot, or a boss discovers a subordinate emails with executives at a competitor.

Blog posts and articles were quick to criticise the way Google has set “Buzz” up and the company was quick to amend the settings to address these concerns. The importance of making shared information always an “opt-in” rather than “opt-out” setting, should really be understood by web services providers by now, especially after valuable lessons have been learnt by services such as Facebook, and the backlash it faced from changes to privacy settings. It seems that Google initially ignored these guidelines to get “Buzz” into the market and to become an active social network as soon as possible.

Google has since gone through several revisions of the “Buzz” settings and now has replaced the opt-out feature and auto-following, with an opt-in feature and auto-suggesting. In reality Google probably rushed this product out too quickly and hadn’t considered the serious privacy concerns that were raised. The impact of the publicity and subsequent changes has affected Google’s attempt to compete in the social networking space within the first few weeks and the ongoing impact may well stymie any serious usage of the “Buzz” tool. Many people also question why they need another new service when they are already using Facebook, Twitter and other accounts.

However, if you have a Gmail account and you’d like more information about “Buzz” or how other social networking tools can help to market you business, please contact us.

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