Google Buzz: Privacy Fail

I was initially excited to see the new Google Buzz appear in my gmail and wrote some silly posts about it with my friends. I was curious, as always, so I started poking around. Interestingly, and much like Facebook, I could see who my friends were following, and who *their* friends were following. I thought nothing of this until I saw a friend's link to a blog entitled "F*ck you, Google" which admonished Google for setting these friends up without permission.


The author was physically abused by a former boyfriend, and he was suddenly a follower in her Buzz. All because they had exchanged emails.


Then I realized that anyone could choose to follow me without my notification or permission. Not sure I like this...


I clicked the "turn off Buzz" button at the bottom of the gmail page and the Buzz folder went away. Am I off the Buzz grid? Not quite!


It turns out that there are some pretty detailed instructions for completely opting out which haven't been well-publicized yet. A friend emailed them to me, and I'll link to them at the bottom of this post.


I've been following Internet privacy for a decade. Initially because I was collecting usage data at work that was illegal to collect, unless we called it "Research & Development" ~~ which it certainly was, so we were in the clear. Our privacy attorney was still pretty squeamish about it though, so we stopped. That program has snowballed into the bandwidth monitoring and limiting program at the US's biggest broadband provider. All because I said "hey, why don't we...?"


I'd like to publicly thank Google for giving us something newsworthy to follow when we aren't watching the Olympics!! I have a feeling we're going to see some new laws and some very quick backpedaling by the big G.


The links I promised, in case you want to opt out too:


http://www.scotxblog.com/legal-tech/gmails-turn-off-buzz-still-does-not-turn-off-buzz-heres-how-to-really-do-it/


http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=175004#off