Keep Your Buzz to Yourself

What’s the Buzz? Google’s newest product, an in-your-face status broadcasting service built onto Gmail that acts like a hybrid of Facebook and Twitter, was launched the day it was announced two weeks ago. The initial reaction, at least at Harvard, has been polarizing. Many students struggled with exactly what Buzz is and how it’s supposed to be used. Is it a way to transmit status updates? Share photos? Meet new people? As a fellow Crimson writer described it, “I don’t know what it is, but I hate it.”

Google remains the best search engine in the world, has one of the most fully-featured free email services around, and keeps yuppies from getting lost in big cities. But social networking may be its Achilles heel. Its version of MySpace, called Orkut, has made inroads in Brazil and India, but lags far behind in the rest of the world. Buzz may someday succeed at supplanting other, more popular social networks, but the product’s abrupt launch has generated serious privacy concerns.

Rather than let users choose their “followers,” the Buzz term for other users who are privy to personal updates, photos, and videos, Google automatically selected a group of followers based on frequent email contacts. Since lists of followers were publicly available, Buzz’s launch shone the cruel light of day onto email relationships better kept secret. Suddenly, journalists’ clandestine contacts were exposed, secret affairs became dramatically less secret, and stalkers obtained a new tool to harass their victims. Oops.

Privacy watchdogs are downright furious, and Google is already reeling from several legal complaints about the auto-following feature of Google Buzz. To its credit, Google responded to the complaints and bad press quickly. It posted an apology on its blog a few days after the launch and quickly reconfigured Buzz so that it would simply suggest followers, instead of making email contacts into followers automatically. It will also no longer automatically broadcast Picasa photos and Google Reader shared items over Buzz. Perhaps the biggest sign of backpedaling is the creation of a prominent button that allows users to disable Buzz entirely.

Can Google’s quick actions save Buzz from a messy launch? Or is Buzz, like the Wave before it, another reflection of Google’s immaturity—its uncanny ability to understand data but its utter hopelessness at understanding people?

The company, founded in 1998, has always been a haven for engineers, who get paid to work on independent projects of their choosing one day each week. While letting the inmates run the asylum has served Google well in the past—side projects have led to about half of the company’s product launches—the decision to include auto-following by default seems like a clear case of engineering enthusiasm trumping common sense.

In its struggle against Facebook, Google must have realized that it already had the necessary information to create a powerful social network. FAS webmail might be fleeting, but Gmails are forever, and a trail of emails going back several years on Google’s servers could create a far richer web of connections than Facebook. However, while Google engineers see emails as raw data, users view their email as private correspondence. Reaching into the personal histories of its users to compile a list of contacts, one that was not only unsolicited but freely accessible, was a major party foul.

Even regarding data that was already publicly available, the Buzz team seemed unable to grasp the concept of user discretion. Google assumed that just because photos were already public on Picasa, users would be perfectly happy to see them broadcast on every channel to contacts that Google had picked out for them.

To be fair, Google is struggling with a novel, asymmetric situation between producers and consumers on the Internet today. Many of the most successful online products, from Gmail to Facebook, are completely free. Yet customers who use these free services nonetheless feel an intense degree of ownership over them, because they traffic in deeply personal data such as emails and photos. Developers have the right to drop new, unsolicited features on their users at any time, even without warning, yet users feel entitled to certain rights of their own—most pressingly, the right to privacy.

If providers of web services are unable to understand the privacy needs of their users, perhaps it is time for the government to enter the fray. When online services such as Gmail are free to change their behavior willy-nilly without so much as a warning, simply educating users about the lack of privacy isn’t enough. We need rules that limit what corporations are allowed to do with our personal data, even when that data is given over willingly to their care.

Regulations are in a company like Google’s own best interest. If this kind of abuse continues, users will do what they would do to any former confidant who started blabbing all of their secrets at a party—defriend them in the morning.

Adam R. Gold ’11, a Crimson editorial writer, is a physics concentrator in Adams House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.