By now you’ve probably heard about the furor around the launch of Buzz, Google’s answer to Facebook and Twitter. Buzz basically leverages your Gmail contacts to launch you into their own social network. The problem with Buzz is that Gmail users weren’t given a choice whether to opt out of Buzz and they suddenly found all of their most frequent email contacts exposed to the outside world.
If, for example, you were using Gmail to correspond with both your wife and an ex-girlfriend this could obviously create some dicey problems for you. There could be a wide variety of situations where you might not want certain friends to know that you’re corresponding with certain other people. Google, apparently oblivious to the privacy concerns that would be raised, plunged forward with their ambitious launch and have been struggling with damage control ever since. Privacy advocates have been understandably howling in rage.
Personally, I haven’t found social networking via Facebook and Twitter to be all that compelling. I can see how kids would love it as a way to keep in touch with friends, but as an adult I am not all that eager to be constantly sharing personal information with a large group of people. And sometimes I don’t really care to get the same sort of gory details that others are sharing about their lives. Consequently, I fairly quickly figured out how to drop out of Buzz which I saw as yet another social network I’m not truly crazy about.
All of this has caused me to question the wisdom of placing so much of my personal information in Google’s hands to begin with. I have been an avid user of Google Docs for sometime. What guarantees do I have that Google won’t dream up some kind of social document tool that would suddenly expose the contents of my documents to the outside world? It may sound far-fetched but is it really?
Tags: Buzz, Social Networking
Thanks for the notice. I found that I had one follower in my profile, but had trouble following some of the instructions in the link you provided. Google may have changed screens since that article. I did find a disable buzz and remove profile in one button under the disable Buzz option. I hope it worked.
Thanks again. This is the first disturbing violation of trust from Google. They were slowly winning me over to the cloud-as-storage concept.
Incidently, I’m glad I correspond with my wife and ex-girlfriends via a different email addresses
jg