Automatically followed by abusive ex-husband (and his friends) on Google Buzz

http://fugitivus.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/fuck-you-google/

by godDLL • 16 years ago

549 275 16 years ago

fugitivus.wordpress.com

waterlesscloud3• 16 years ago

This is the sort of thing that was absolutely predictable.

fnid25• 16 years ago

If you are certain that this was absolutely predictable, you are implying either:

a) The Google Buzz people are so stupid that they couldn't have predicted this absolutely predictable thing (no one else did that I know of until it bit them) or

b) they knew this would happen and chose to allow it to happen in the bad times hoping the love they'd get from those who like it would be greater than the pain experienced by those to whom it happened.

If either (a) or (b) is true, can we trust Google with our private information? Either they are too dumb to keep it out of the wrong hands or they don't care about individuals' privacy.

ajdecon• 16 years ago

(b) is almost certain. I have trouble believing no one at Google thought, "I have people in my email contacts I don't want to share with on Buzz." They probably thought that these cases would be in a tiny minority, and that they could respond to complaints with pointers for how to block people.

raquo• 16 years ago

So you say that a team of engineers does not understand that most frequent contacts != those whom I wish to share my stuff with? Are edge cases like the original post hard to predict? Did they do any testing, even with their friends/colleagues?

That doesn't sound smart to me. Either their incentives are misaligned (b) or there are some other problems.

Snark7• 16 years ago

c) http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/s/SNAFUprinciple.html

Generally speaking, it is difficult for useful information to flow in organizations. Most of the time, this lack of circulation is not remarkable, but this looks like a big deal to me, the sort of thing that gives PR people nightmares. I would wager that at least one Buzz engineer raised this concern weeks if not months ago but was ignored or pressured into backing down.

SamAtt• 16 years ago

There are other options available. What almost certainly happened here is that Google was so concerned with getting the features right that they pushed it out without asking "What could go wrong?"

A lot of startups do that and most of the time they're fine because they can learn as their user base grows. But Google made a strategic decision to bind Buzz to Gmail and that is what caused the problem.

The lesson is that a lot of people are thoughtless when building technology but once you get to the size of Google you can no longer afford to be as lax as everyone else.

waterlesscloud3• 16 years ago

I know it was absolutely predictable because c), I predicted it. About 20 minutes into using Buzz. I posted on my Buzz, in fact, that I was waiting to see the resulting mess.

So yes, I'm certain that it was.

Semiapies• 16 years ago

Exactly so: if you put your address and other contact information online, people will find it.

I started off agreeing with her complaint, but it suddenly struck me: she's trying to avoid an abusive ex-husband - why on Earth did she even put that information in her Google profile to start with?

I have estranged family members, which is exactly why I don't put that sort of information in online profiles, and I'm not even worrying about an abusive husband who has my email address.

kevingadd• 16 years ago

How do you not see this coming with a feature like Buzz? Why didn't they do any sort of staged roll-out or opt-in for a feature with such obvious privacy implications? I'm stunned. Doesn't Google employ tons of lawyers, ethics experts, or people with enough common sense to spot this?

Maybe it was some sort of skunk-works project that got out without sufficient oversight?

motters• 16 years ago

Google employs a lot of smart people, so this is a real failure on their part - probably the biggest that I've yet seen from them. All previous similar addons to gmail have been opt in, so I wonder what caused them to change that policy in this case.

CaptainZapp• 16 years ago

I'd wager a guess: Greed?

So much for do no evil...

lsc• 16 years ago

but it's /stupid/ to piss away the goodwill of nerds, and there is a rather large subset of the nerd population that is freakishly concerned about privacy. If you want to do business with nerds, you need to respect that.

Google, I think, did a very good job of building trust and enthusiasm with nerds; it's super important for them, we are the influencers here. Sure, nerds never click on ads, but who do you think sets up the computer for the confused normals who do?

The number of nerds I know who hate google to the point of using inferior search engines is growing over time.

rbanffy2• 16 years ago

> Why didn't they do any sort of staged roll-out or opt-in

I distinctly remember to have clicked in something like "I want to use buzz" before having it enabled

danparsonson• 16 years ago

You get the intro page with a button at the bottom ("Sweet! Check out Buzz!") but the feature is automatically enabled.

RiderOfGiraffes2• 16 years ago

Amongst others, this is one reason why I'm not an early-adopter. Too many things have odd consequences, and although this one is and pretty much always was obvious, many are not, and require devious minds and talented/persistent hackers to find them.

So, in fact, this is an opportunity to say "thank you" to the hackers out there that tinker with and attempt to break (sorry - "improve") everything as soon as they can get their hands on it. You make the world a better place.

ableal• 16 years ago

Nice walk-through, for the cautious like you and me:

http://savedelete.com/discover-how-to-do-use-google-buzz-and...

(posted yesterday by yogeshmankani: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1118141 )

dagobart2• 16 years ago

as you get auto-subscribed, this is no early adopter. Gmail's around for years

ThinkWriteMute• 16 years ago

Having worked in the family services sector...I'm actually thinking this post is full bullshit. I very much doubt this even happened.

I could be wrong of course, but the post has way too many red flags to sound true.

snprbob86• 16 years ago

Please list some of these red flags for those of us without a family services sector background.

rwhitman• 16 years ago

There are clearly no longer any humans working at google, just one giant heartless inhuman machine calling the shots...

Or at least thats how Google looks to the public these days. If thats the perception they want, they got it.

I think this Buzz privacy fiasco is an historic lesson in the convergence of humanity and software and the lesson learned is that privacy of personal relationships should be a fundamental right

jasonlotito8• 16 years ago

Not sure what the problem is. I have complete control over the privacy settings of all my accounts. After reading the post, I think the problem is the poster made a choice before this not to use the privacy features.

dkersten6• 16 years ago

Google added Buzz to my account automatically and automatically added people form my contact list - some of whom I don't think should have been added - and I had to actively go and search for the privacy/remove/turn off features.

If, on the other hand, Google had said "heres our new Google Buzz feature, heres how to turn it on, heres the privacy settings and heres how you can add everyone|people you talk to regularly|manually add" then I'd be perfectly happy. Opt in is better than opt out, as far as privacy is concerned.

lucifer• 16 years ago

When you have HN readers complaining about this issue, then we can be fairly certain that the average user of Google's products will have a very difficult time finding their way to the "privacy features" controls, and in effect Google has already made these privacy decisions for them.

sker2• 16 years ago

I'm not sure what the problem is either. I also have complete control over my privacy settings, but it seems you can't say that in this particular topic because the army of group-thinkers will down-vote you (read: censor your comment) to oblivion.

We can't have two-sided conversations in HN anymore. Either you bash Buzz/Google or get the hell out of this thread.

goodside• 16 years ago

Recklessness and lack of foresight doesn't make you inhuman. If you forwarded this post back in time to the Buzz engineers, they would try to fix it before launch -- not laugh maniacally at the thought of an innocent woman fearing for her safety.

mechanical_fish4• 16 years ago

The engineers are human. I'm sure they're as horrified as you suggest.

Companies are not human, certainly not by default. The vector sum of the effort of many humans is inhuman by default. [1] (Phrases like "mob mentality", "team spirit", and "groupthink" didn't get invented for nothing.) It takes hard work to give a company a human face -- hard work by management, by PR, by customer support, by HR. Some companies are much better at such work than others.

---

[1] This is, of course, a perennial topic here on HN: It's easier to run a human company when the company has fewer people. That's one of a startup's advantages.

Of course, a company that is too small runs the risk of being too human: Humans, for example, are prone to emotional roller-coastering, can become fixated on the trees instead of seeing the forest, and need at least some sleep every day. A team's inherent "inhumanity" can help smooth out misfeatures like this.

tom_rath• 16 years ago

Time travel would be spiffy, but how easy is it to contact the Buzz engineers now?

If you've ever dealt with Google "technical support" (even if you're a customer who shovels them buckets of cash each week) you'll find that it's nearly impossible to reach an actual human being who can help you.

Convoluted as it is, getting a blog post ranked top in Hacker News seems the easiest (only?) way to get a genuine Google issue addressed. I hope they address this one AND create an actual means of contacting the people who are supposed to be running the place.

petewarden2• 16 years ago

No, they wouldn't. I'm saying this as somebody who built a product around identifying your 'inner circle' from your email patterns[1]. The part I spent the most time on was figuring out how to protect people's privacy, and these scenarios were painfully obvious even to me.

Plenty of people at Google have to have thought this through, but decided the benefits to adoption of the current process outweigh the privacy problems that will happen to some people. That's pretty evil in my book...

[1] http://web.mailana.com/demoday/

pasbesoin4• 16 years ago

If all aspects of participation were opt in -- as they should be -- the problem could have been avoided. (It would help if the implications of participation were laid out up front, clearly, as well.)

And "opt in" is hardly a new concept.

This was totally preventable, through a well-worn paradigm of customer engagement.

Google has no excuse for this. They were greedy, and they screwed their customers, big time.

Vivtek5• 16 years ago

On the one hand, I can envision actual engineers saying, "D'oh, we should have thought of that!" And at the same time, I have a hard time imagining that if even I was aware of a lot of furor about Facebook turning on new features that remove previously assumed privacy, the people at Google whose professional interests revolve around these features weren't also aware of that furor.

The only real conclusion I can draw is that they just didn't care. Sort of "We're Google, we have vast amounts of data, and we'll do whatever the hell we please with it, and if you have a problem, talk to the hand." I've been given the Google hand to talk to before (most people using AdSense have) and this is really getting to be a problem.

And yeah, I'm a freelancer, and yeah, I sometimes use Gmail, and yeah, it's not really a Good Thing for business if my customers can see each other. I'm not in danger of being raped by any of them, mind you, but this just doesn't seem to fall under the aegis of "don't be evil".

wmeredith• 16 years ago

>Recklessness and lack of foresight doesn't make you inhuman.

If anything, I'd say it makes you human.

jazzychad• 16 years ago

I have never created a google profile either. Is simply clicking "turn off buzz" at the bottom of gmail sufficient to completely opt-out of all of this nonsense? ...because that's exactly what I want to do at this point.

bozmac2• 16 years ago

You'll have to block people who are following you first

roqetman2• 16 years ago

No, if you don't have a public profile, then no-one will be following you.

etherealG• 16 years ago

uh, nothing that you post on anywhere outside buzz is propagated via buzz unless you ask buzz to propagate it, unless I missed something. also, buzz doesn't have access to this information unless you allow it to. it seemed that way to me when I used it.

cookiecaper• 16 years ago

Buzz automatically adds at least Reader and Picasa streams to your Buzz account.

losvedir• 16 years ago

But it's not too hard to remove them.

The way the Buzz settings found my contacts and added them was perfect, because I use my gmail account frequently with my friends -- I'm right in their ideal use case.

This person didn't -- either she could not have "Okayed" Buzz at all and there would be no issue, or once she saw that it added all the wrong people she could disable her sites and then not post to it.

sailormoon• 16 years ago

I must say that this person strikes me as having "issues" and thus I think I'll wait for more information before passing judgement. I mean just look at rest of the blog. I look at that, and I do not think, "wow, that's a calm, reasonable person who is going to give me a fair and balanced description of what the problem is".

houseabsolute• 16 years ago

I don't understand what more information you need. Do you believe she's lying? She makes no secret of her difficult past on her blog.

bad_user• 16 years ago

Only calm and reasonable people should be listened to?

Of course she's having issues. We all do. That's how it is in the real world ;) ... and some of us are extroverts, sharing our feelings with others. But it doesn't mean that if I have a message for Fred, everybody should read it ... and normal people don't know how to protect themselves, that's why this whole trend on "public by default" taken by Google and others is so worrying.

griftah3• 16 years ago

If you have a message for Fred, send it to Fred privately. Don't share it with whole world.

benatkin• 16 years ago

If you're an active user of Google Reader's social networking features who tried out Buzz, please chime in. I wonder if it really happened as automatically as it sounds, from the post, or if she missed something. (I've tried out Buzz, but haven't used Google Reader in months.)

wyclif• 16 years ago

I've been an active user of Google Reader since it went live, and I also have a Google profile. When I enabled Buzz, the only users added to my Buzz network were those already in my GReader shared network. Then I added a few others to Buzz. No problems here; no sense of an invasion of privacy whatsoever.

The rub is that I have no idea what results look like for those who don't use GReader or GProfile.

nimrody• 16 years ago

I use google reader and I have noticed only new shared items on Buzz posts. I.e., it did not automatically 'publish' old stuff I have shared.

Seems OK with me. In fact, I kind of like it.

Only complaints I have are: 1. Missing tagging functionality (or I haven't found one) 2. No centralized 'privacy control panel'

JulianMorrison2• 16 years ago

One thing that certainly is true about this: there's no simple, obvious single place to tune all your Google privacy settings. I've found how to do it, but I had to look under cushions and behind the sofa, so to speak.

DTrejo2• 16 years ago

Where is it?

dkersten6• 16 years ago

You can turn Buzz off on the bottom of your gmail page and privacy settings can be found at https://www.google.com/accounts/ though I still found it awkward and unintuitive really.

JulianMorrison2• 16 years ago

You can configure buzz's connection to other sites by going to gmail, buzz, "n connected sites" above the text box, click the Edit link next to (non editable!) item that says Public. A box pops open with a link to that site's privacy page.

sz• 16 years ago

Dashboard?

https://www.google.com/dashboard/

radu_floricica• 16 years ago

I'd like a clarification from somebody who uses Reader / Picassa. Is any of the stuff that's suddenly available to following people actually private, in the sense of impossible to access? Or simply "obscure", i.e. if you know the username and look for it you can find it?

griftah3• 16 years ago

Obscure.

Lazlo_Nibble• 16 years ago

Wrong -- it adds the list of people you exchange email with to the list of people you follow, which is publicly visible by default. There was no way for anyone to see who you exchange email with until this happened.

The fact that you can go back and block your "following" list from public view is irrelevant -- the list of people you exchange email with should never have been put on that list without your explicit consent. It's a unilateral change in the terms of the agreement you have with Google. Letting Google publish a list of people I follow in Google Reader is consent to publish a list of people I follow in Google Reader -- it is NOT consent to publish a list of people I email or who email me.

illumin8• 16 years ago

I'm trying to understand how this is a problem. Surely, it doesn't matter who is following you, as long as you don't post through Buzz. This sounds like someone complaining about wierdos following you on Twitter. Nobody is forcing you to tweet. If you don't want to publish your life to the world, then don't.

loup-vaillant5• 16 years ago

The issue was about Google reader. The information she put there to share with friends apparently leaked. It can happen whenever privacy policies are changed, by the way.

godDLL6• 16 years ago

She does use the social features, and the communication; albeit limited to her two closest relatives. These are all the people she ever wanted to use her e-mail, Reader sharing, and chat with.

Gmail keeps track of your correspondents and automatically nominates them to be your social circle, which is way out of the scope of this girl's usage and requirements for and e-mail client. What she wanted was web-based anonymous e-mail, and Google didn't help her out there much.

loup-vaillant5• 16 years ago

"web-based anonymous e-mail" can't exist. It is just too tempting for the hosting company to use your personal data without your explicit consent.

GiraffeNecktie3• 16 years ago

I think the point is that she was operating under the understanding that she was NOT publishing to the world ... and all of a sudden, not only is she publishing to the world, it's been made retroactive and she can't block anyone stalking her. How does that not suck?

moultano• 16 years ago

That was a mistaken understanding. Reader has always published to the world unless you specified otherwise.

jfager10• 16 years ago

When you sign up to twitter, you know what you're getting into, and you act accordingly - maybe you use an anonymous handle, maybe you only share certain things, maybe you keep your account private, etc.

When you signed up for Gmail and Reader accounts, you thought you were getting email and RSS, and you acted differently than you would for a twitter account. For Google to suddenly invert those expectations is jarring and unwelcome, and to expose personal information derived from activities undertaken with particular expectations in place is a complete betrayal of trust. I still can't believe how stupid Google was about this.

mattmcknight2• 16 years ago

I think the parent comment was referring to sharing items in Google Reader, which was public or only to friends (which were generated from the people I had listed Google Talk, initially for me)

The parent comment missed the fact that before you were sharing links, here you are sharing the list of people you email frequently or chat with, which is an entirely different proposition and was handled poorly in a misguided attempt to imitate your twitter "following" list.

Except for that oversight on the list of people you are following, the Google sharing model for items you share is much more advanced than Twitter or Facebook, and makes it easy to share things with a particular group of people.

rapind2• 16 years ago

I wish I could look poke around with the settings and give some advice on how to avoid this... but I can't even get buzz to show up with a gmail domain account. Anyone else have integration issues between domain accounts, premium accounts, and plain gmail accounts?

drusenko2• 16 years ago

yes. domain accounts are considered "business" accounts and do not get any of the new features until they are proven out -- we're usually on a 4-9 month exciting feature delay.

rapind2• 16 years ago

And yet somehow for a while I had a personal account linked with my domain account, but the passwords were different... The behavior isn't that of the least surprise I've come to expect from google.

monkeygrinder• 16 years ago

I have a few questions - how did it find her anonymous blog? I assume it was a Blogger account? I've turned Buzz off and yet my work colleague next to me said he is getting notifications that I am 'following' him - on Buzz, Reader. It's more tricky than Twitter, because I can't 'unfollow' people. Google Buzz also found the one tweet my friend sent in 2007 and published it on Buzz as latest news. They could make privacy a little easier for the non-tech folk - ie most of the population - or there will be these sorts of knee jerk reactions.

jsz0• 16 years ago

Probably. It linked up an old Blogger account of mine that I haven't used in years. It could have been embarrassing since it was exposed to all my GMail contacts who might have enabled Buzz including people I barely know, work collages, etc. The Blogger account has a bunch of stupid stuff on it that was only intended to be viewed by friends. I'm quite sure someone could have found it by cyber stalking me but to have it shoved in their faces is entirely different. Of course I'm not even sure what other people on Buzz could see. There's no clear distinction between public & private information.

loup-vaillant5• 16 years ago

This is the problem when you give your personal data to big companies. They do what they want with it, and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. They have the power, you do not. It was obvious with Facebook, now it becomes obvious with Google. But really, it should be obvious for any online service. Starting with web mail.

"Technology Shouldn't Give Big Brother a Head Start" Bruce Schneier http://www.schneier.com/essay-281.html

"I will offer you free web hosting, with some PHP doodads; and you get spying. For free." Eben Moglen http://www.isoc-ny.org/?p=1338

Pahalial• 16 years ago

Honestly, Google is still allowing me to opt out at any time. They (as far as we know) use "eventual deletion," but it's still deletion. Facebook on the other hand has so far retained everything that has ever been on it, according to the interview with an employee that was on HN a few weeks ago. ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1045879 )

That said, the way Buzz was introduced was definitely a leap in the wrong direction by Google.

Tichy• 16 years ago

I completely don't understand Buzz yet. Can somebody explain why Buzz allowed that husband to read things he couldn't read before? Did it publish private conversations?

rksprst• 16 years ago

It seems like when she signed up to Buzz it auto-followed her most frequently used contacts (which included her ex-husband). As a follower he was able to read her shared google reader feeds (since those items are automatically shared via Buzz) and since she put personal info in her the comments she made to shared items, her abusive ex-husband was able to see them.

Sukotto2• 16 years ago

She set up a shared G-reader feed for her trusted contacts to read. Buzz auto-added her untrusted contacts.

The shared feed included sensitive info (like where she lives) and now that secret info is available to her violent and abusive ex-spouse (and all his friends.

GiraffeNecktie3• 16 years ago

I think she should get a lawyer and sue Google's ass.

jm4• 16 years ago

On what grounds do you think she could file a lawsuit and have an expectation of it going anywhere? GMail is a free service for most users. You could choose not to use or it just turn off Buzz. You don't go around suing people just because you can't figure out how to set preferences. It's not like they're acting in bad faith by deliberately making it difficult to disable.

GiraffeNecktie3• 16 years ago

Well, first of all, whether it's free or not is pretty much irrelevant. This is a business for Google - they're taking people's personal information and using it to make billions of dollars in advertising. I don't think it would be hard to convince a jury that they have a duty to make a reasonable effort to protect the information that has been entrusted to their care.

conanite• 16 years ago

The author seems like a competent internet user. I wonder though what happens to the intersection of people with her privacy needs and the people who don't know how to login to facebook?

aswanson• 16 years ago

It was ridiculously arrogant to just force-configure a network on users like that. Thinking of dumping my Gmail account.

danudey5• 16 years ago

Thinking about it won't solve anything, because if you just think about it you won't do it.

If you don't like the faceless information harvesting machine Google is becoming, ditch their services. Otherwise, may as well just accept it.

altano• 16 years ago

I've absolutely adored gmail since I got it for forwarding, spam filtering, and providing me with a permanent email address to give out to people. I'm definitely ditching it now over this and this alone. Which sucks because I will miss those great attributes, but they simply aren't worth this nonsense.

Maybe if I could have easily turned it off (or if it was opt-in, of course)...

Sukotto2• 16 years ago

This really demonstrates the difference between intelligence and wisdom. Whomever wrote this thing in their 20% time was likely really smart but really unwise. :-(

hussong2• 16 years ago

At first, I was thinking this came from Google intensely dogfooding their products in-house before releasing them into the wild: Within a company, you solve privacy issues simply by not sharing personal secrets. The frame of communication is professional and work-related and the mundane chatter won't get you in trouble.

But then again, I'm not sure if Eric Schmidt would happily share who he's corresponding with or following with the entire staff...

EricBurnett2• 16 years ago

I think the point most people are missing is that the data Google shared was already public. Reader has its own privacy and sharing policies, and as far as I can tell Buzz respects these. Even if this person successfully polices Buzz, the reader feed is still out there, public and waiting to be found.

Reader privacy settings can be changed at https://www.google.com/reader/view/?tab=my#friends-manager-p...

roqetman2• 16 years ago

I agree - I don't have a public profile setup, so nothing was added to buzz for me.

tessro• 16 years ago

Sure, but there's a huge difference between "waiting to be found" and "pushed to the foreground".

It's just like the Facebook Newsfeed debacle. People tend to have an expectation of "how public" something is on a scale, and when that changes suddenly it can be a bit jarring. Ultimately, people adjust -- but it's a mistake to look at public/private as a binary concept. In many people's minds, it is a sliding scale.

Tawheed3• 16 years ago

If anything, Google should've learned from the Facebook debacle before releasing a News Feed of their own. Essentially, Google made the SAME EXACT mistakes as Facebook did.

icey• 16 years ago

I'm not sure this is entirely right. I have a public profile on Google, but it didn't announce the people that I converse with on a regular basis before Buzz (at least as far as I know).

I turned off Buzz because I don't see a value in it for me, but before that I had to search to figure out how to make it so that my contacts were not made public. I was a little irate because it represented a significant portion of my client list which is more than a little bit frustrating.

EricBurnett2• 16 years ago

That they acknowledged as a mistake, and rectified early on. When you first turned on Buzz, there would have been an option for whether or not you wanted to have your contacts displayed, however I guess it wasn't easy to find. Shortly after releasing Buzz, they made it a lot more obvious (I guess due to user complaints):

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/millions-of-buzz-users... (item # 1)

They are certainly responsive to these issues, however the fact is their approach to privacy was confusing from the start, which is a recipe for disaster.

lallysingh• 16 years ago

bullshit. Google just redefined "public."

theli0nheart• 16 years ago

Thank you for pointing this out. This entire Google Buzz is infiltrating my privacy BS has got to stop.

ANH• 16 years ago

Voted this up because I don't recall saying 'yes' to Buzz, yet somehow I'm following people I never wanted to follow, and people are following me who are completely unfamiliar to me. And apparently I've shared some items I "shared" only due to an errant mouse-click many moons ago.

pilif2• 16 years ago

I wonder... before buzz, her ex-husband could also have followed her, probably without her ever noticing. Now that buzz generated, well, buzz, she found out about it and now can actually take mesures to block her ex.

While I see dubious value of automatically setting often mailing addresses to following (this should not have been the case, IMHO), I have a feeling that the much more visible follow-relationships right now might actually be an improvement to the older situation where you never really knew who was following whom, as right now, you actually have a chance to find out about it.

(also as a preventive measure: I'm not trying to troll. I understand her and I'm feeling bad for her, but I would really like to discuss whether this can't actually be some kind of a good thing as she at least knows that he's following her now)

mechanical_fish4• 16 years ago

You don't get to cherry-pick the scenarios. If you're going to play the cost-benefit game you have to enumerate them all, or at least all of the common ones.

(Here's just one of the many alternative scenarios: For every technically-sophisticated stalker who is unmasked by this change, I'll bet there are several technically-unsophisticated stalkers who didn't used to know how to stalk someone through Google, but who now do.)

Anyway, you can do all the sociological research you want, but that still doesn't make it right to manipulate someone else's personal toolset without their consent. You still have to ask. The person who does get to cherry-pick scenarios -- to steer the course of his or her life in situationally-appropriate ways -- is the customer. Unless you're a Google customer, apparently, in which case the company will change the nature of its existing tools, without fair warning, to suit its own benefit.

pilif2• 16 years ago

Thanks. I see.

I do also think though that the previous setup provided security by obscurity (it was hard to stalk, but it was also hard to notice being stalked), whereas the new setup is open about that fact.

Relying on your stalker not to be technically-sophisticated seems risky.

I agree on the point of not changing existing tools, though arguably, this was a change for the better (now you see that you are being stalked and how to stop it), albeit one which could have done even better (by turning all of the existing features off, then implementing buzz and then giving people the chance to opt-in again).

nfnaaron2• 16 years ago

"The person who does get to cherry-pick scenarios -- to steer the course of his or her life in situationally-appropriate ways -- is the customer."

As has been pointed out here on HN, we are not the customer. The customer is the ad buyer. We are merely the sheep, here to be regularly shorn by serving ads to us and analyzing our data and networks.

As has also been pointed out here on HN, Google doesn't treat their customers (ad buyers) very well. Given that, how well would you expect them to treat the sheep?

hussong2• 16 years ago

The ability to set privacy settings individually per contact, not just on the entire list seems to be a critical missing feature on buzz.

There are some people you don't want to follow at all, and there are some people you want to follow in private.

As a friend of mine pointed out in a recent blog post, you really don't want to make all info on all the people you follow public, especially if they're your kids: http://anwag.posterous.com/

raganwald4• 16 years ago

Ask HN:

I don't have a Google Profile, I said no thanks when Gmail asked me if I wanted to try Buzz, and I clicked "turn off buzz" at the bottom of gmail. Can anyone tell me if people can follow me in Buzz? Or if I'm following anybody?

I have been clicking around in Google and I have no idea how to control this and I don't want to turn Buzz on by accident...

Rant:

The terrible thing is, I didn't give Buzz another thought until all this negative publicity turned up. Now I'm sitting here very paranoid that Google is misusing information about me. And I'm wasting a lot of time trying to figure out what it is or isn't doing. I resent having this fear and I am annoyed that my lack of confidence that "No Means No" leads to wasting time on Google.

You can definitely add me to the list of people who believe Google is the new Microsoft. They have hired some of this generations' best and brightest for what? To find new ways to spray ad feces on the Internet, to kowtow to oppressive regimes up to the moment when they realized they were being back stabbed, and to treat privacy as a quaint and archaic notion.

Worst of all, from the perspective of the HN community, they seem to be acting like the Microsoft of old: Instead of indexing information, they want to own it themselves, which is why they roll out services like Buzz directly competing with Twitter, Foursquare, Friendfeed, Facebook, and so on.

It's a sad day for Google when I start to sympathize with Rupert Murdoch. But now I understand why he wasn't rushing to embrace how Google would add value to his news businesses.

shaddi• 16 years ago

I've got the same question. Shoot me an email and I can try to follow you and report back; I'd appreciate if you did the same.

raganwald4• 16 years ago

I set up a fake account for testing and tried to search for myself using my various email addresses. They don't seem to exist. So right now I think that setting up a Profile is the key. Once you set that up, Buzz can start sharing your information and you would have to fool around with privacy settings to shut that down.

I hope I'm mistaken about this, it would seriously suck http://rot13.com/index.php?text=fhpx%20tbng%20qvpx if your profile is the key to broadcasting news about you to everyone in your (automatically generated) address book including who is frequently mailed or mailing you.

Pistos2• 16 years ago

Using another gmail account, I tried to discover what is being exposed via Buzz about my primary gmail account. Other than have one follow the other, I couldn't see anything that wasn't already exposed through my Google Profile. I don't use Google Reader for anything besides RSS, and even so, I don't refer to it any more (I use FriendFeed for RSS).

There must be particular kinds or sets of data that are exposed by Buzz, and I must not have contributed anything to those corpi. Some particular things that don't seem to have been made public via Buzz: my gmail contact list; any of my email, sent or received; Google Groups postings; any Google Chat conversations; nothing about or from my Google Wave account; Google Reader subscribed feeds.

jim_lawless• 16 years ago

I do not have a Google profile, but I did re-activate Buzz this evening so that I could go back in and block any followers I had.

I edited the list of people that Buzz automatically followed on my behalf and un-followed all of them.

I edited the list of apps whose status changes would be automatically Buzzed ( like Picasa ) and removed them.

Then, I deactivated Buzz again.

I suspect that I'm going to have to repeat this process periodically.

raganwald4• 16 years ago

So it's possible for people to follow you on Buzz even if you don't have a Google profile and you have never activated Buzz?

Tawheed3• 16 years ago

Class action lawsuit?

nfnaaron2• 16 years ago

You'd have to have people who were provably harmed, in a way that jurors or judges would recognized as harmed. Google will defend themselves vigorously, and likely win. And it would take a long time.

More effective to just leave gmail. It threads conversations and gives you a lot of storage. Other than that it's just email.

There are lots of cheap email options where the only way the provider makes money is by you paying them a small amount of it, not by sifting and analyzing the contents of your email and the relationships between your contacts and correspondents.

berglund• 16 years ago

The (false) assumption is that a person has inherent privacy both on the internets and in the carbon based world. A very quick look at your local property appraisers office or clerk of courts should show you that the individual must be vigilant in protecting this right.

I don't trust google anymore than I trust any individual I don't know. I am using their service, and I know that they can give up all me emails, on purpose or by accident, and I have to be aware of what I send over that service. Clearly google has done a foolish thing here, but based on the above, not one that should have been unexpected.

Such is the state of modern life. You can always shut it off.

pasbesoin4• 16 years ago

Amen.

A close family member has spent the past decade going to sometimes extreme measures to avoid an abusive ex-spouse.

Google has potentially pre-emptively revealed their contact information; and not through their own choices and/or lack of action (on zero notice, spending perhaps hours wandering through a plenitude of scattered and poorly documented Buzz settings and behaviors -- please!). No: Any email contact who uses Gmail is now a potential point of exposure for them.

ABSOLUTELY UNACCEPTABLE.

Stupidity can aid and abet evil, Google. If you are not purposefully evil, you are aiding and abetting it.

My trust is gone. It's not coming back.

If you want any measure of damage control, you will determine who was actually responsible for this. And everyone in a position of responsibility for this product who did not understand or chose not to heed these concerns. And you will terminate them. Anything less, and we can do no more than expect similar bad decisions -- from those same people -- in the future.

jamesbritt3• 16 years ago

"And you will terminate them. Anything less, and we can do no more than expect similar bad decisions -- from those same people -- in the future."

I'm not looking to defend Google's choices about Buzz. But I take exception to the idea of firing people who make bad decisions without due consideration for how those decisions came about.

It flies in the face of a mantra at HN: Fail early and often. It goes against the idea that you learn by making mistakes.

If a company fires people for making a poor decision out of ignorance, then they have just lost someone with valuable experience about a potentially troublesome choice. Now that company has to go get someone who (most likely) has not fucked up in that way. (I bet most places do not hire people who got fired from another job for fucking up.)

Who is more likely to make that same or a similar mistake in the future? The person who already fucked up and learned something, or the new person without that experience?

Some people screw up because they are innately incompetent in some field. Let them go; they will not get any better.

Others screw up because they are doing something new, or acting with incomplete or wrong information. In that case, the problem may not be the person but the situation.

Fix the conditions, don't just find a scapegoat.

Vivtek5• 16 years ago

This is really well-considered.

jfager10• 16 years ago

It flies in the face of a mantra at HN: Fail early and often. It goes against the idea that you learn by making mistakes.

When you're a young, tiny startup, you can fail early and often because the costs of doing so are outweighed by the benefit of the education you get, both to yourself and to society at large.

This is Google. It's huge, it's been around the block a few times, it's already had a ton of failures, and millions of people rely on it. It can't and shouldn't have the same latitude to fail, especially in an area as important as privacy.

pasbesoin4• 16 years ago

This situation is not simply a matter of inconvenience. It's a matter of users' safety including physical safety.

As an example of some thoughts on the latter:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1119173

And it is not a terribly challenging intellectual exercise to realize some of the implications of the product rollout as configured and executed.

Finally, having used and observed Google products for some time now, I perceive it to be yet another in an increasing cascade of decisions and behaviors that have short-shifted legitimate and often apparent security considerations. Yes, that is my opinion. So is my parent comment. Take from it what you will.

First, in my further opinion, there are "mistakes" that are simply too significant to just forgive and learn from. They demonstrate an inability of the parties responsible to carry out their duties and responsibilities. I see Buzz as such a case.

Second, Google as an institution has let various aspects that are exposed by these situations -- from effective design and execution, particularly with respect to some aspects of security, to effective customer relations -- slide for too long. If they are going to improve, it's become apparent that as an institution they are going to have to take some dramatic action. Something that communicates to their employees that the status quo will no longer do.

It's my opinion. And maybe I'm overly pissed off at the moment. But this Buzz rollout is particularly boneheaded, and Google is better off without the employees who had responsibility for preventing such a fiasco.

Google held many customers by making enough of a show about being concerned for their privacy. It's what kept me using their search results, despite the increasing tracking they've been implementing. They are at risk of losing this perception now in the public and upon the part of their customer base.

When your customers don't trust you, your other efforts at engagement run a distant second.

Flemlord• 16 years ago

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place..."

-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, in 2009.

dmm• 16 years ago

I hate that attitude so much. I hate that man.

We are all criminals in today's world. He understands that. He just doesn't care. He's a part of the elite that can afford lawyers and protection.

In my wildest dreams he is sued under the DMCA for making a backup copy of one of his kid's dvds.

HATE

tsally3• 16 years ago

As I pointed out two months ago, this quote is taken out of context [1]. I'll reproduce the full quote here:

Judgment matters... If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place... If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines - including Google - do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.

Schmidt simply suggested that if you have an extraordinarily high need for privacy you should not use Google. He's right and I agree with him. This is the CEO of a company reminding his consumers that Google has to conform to the PATRIOT Act. He's saying something that could potentially hurt his business by pointing out how your privacy is hurt because of the laws they have to comply to.

Remember the attack on Google by China a few weeks back? Where the subject lines of the email of civil rights activists were compromised? This happened because of a mechanism Google was forced to put in place to conform to federal wiretap laws. Schmidt was spot on in what he said.

We've got a strong enough case against Google without resorting to cheap tricks. What they've done with Buzz is unforgivable. I may well be migrating away from Google's services in the next week or two, depending on how this pans out.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=984646

josefresco• 16 years ago

Even taken in context that statement is still very scary. He's not saying you should use judgment on what search engine to use, he's saying you should use judgment on the action alone. The fact that he watered the statement down right after and then pulled the old "we're just following the law" doesn't make it any better.

ConceptDog4• 16 years ago

If you have concerns over privacy, move your data somewhere that doesn't obviously look into your private data for the purposes of advertising.

Stay anonymous. Use your ISP's email. Use accounts you pay for and can hold accountable for transgressions like this.

You give your data freely to google without understanding the terms of that transaction and they will use those rights in some way you arn't happy with.

She should cancel all of her google accounts and move somewhere that gives more favorable terms of service and is directly accountable to her.

waterlesscloud3• 16 years ago

Having thought about it some more, Google is in deep and immediate trouble. They need to act swiftly (in days) and decisively to get on top of this before public perception gets out of hand.

Simply put, Google can NOT afford to have public opinion turn against their opt-out model. Their whole vision depends on opt-out.

But think about what a week or two of stories like this will do. Opt-out will become synonymous with evil. Then how dows Google Book's stance to authors look? How do all their other auto-data collection techniques look?

Google depends on opt-out to their very core, down to robots.txt.

They can't afford public opinion to turn against that, and it's going to if they don't move fast.

anigbrowl2• 16 years ago

Entirely agree. You and I know how Google works, but most people think they either configure their servers manually or that they supervise them all in real time. It's like those stories of a dead person receiving a computer-generated bill or debtor's letter - there's no malice intended, but it makes everyone feel bad and damages the reputation of the organization involved.

ConceptDog4• 16 years ago

The majority of people don't and will never care about their privacy, particularly when connected to the internet.

People who feel harmed by this will be upset and will hopefully understand that they were far more vulnerable than they believed, then take steps to insure that it doesn't happen again.

Some people will feign indignation at whats happened to her, claim to be boycotting google, then abandon the prospect when they see how much of a pain it is to change to another service.

Most people will never hear about this, and if they do, they won't really care. GMail works for them, they don't understand or care about their privacy. They have a service that works and is implied to be free.

mbrubeck3• 16 years ago

Their privacy improvements last night[1] look good on a technical level, but they don't fully address either the underlying user confusion, or the PR issue (they haven't offered a sincere apology).

[1] http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/millions-of-buzz-users...

algorias2• 16 years ago

Isn't it reasonable to expect privacy by default? Should't you be able to hold even a free service accountable for such a transgression? Google's 'if you have nothing to hide...' attitude should not be tolerated.

ConceptDog4• 16 years ago

It's also reasonable to expect someone to read the terms of the contract they enter into.

When you skip those terms of service, you're agreeing to those terms.

You also always have the choice not to tollerate them. Move away from their service. Don't use google for search. They track every search that you perform tied against your IP.

If your privacy matters, take the time to protect it.

anigbrowl2• 16 years ago

We're not talking about the relationship between her and Google, but the one between her and her ex-husband, into which google has unwittingly interposed itself.

ConceptDog4• 16 years ago

She willingly included Google in that relationship by making him a contact and giving Google information that they had a relationship.

You can't give away information and expect it not to be acted upon. Corporations are not bound by anything except for the law and the contract they form with you. If it's within their rights, they can and will act upon it.

txxxxd• 16 years ago

"Stay anonymous. Use your ISP's email"

You ISP is the least anonymous email provider available. They know exactly who you are, where you live, and can see everything you do online.

telemachos• 16 years ago

I may be wrong, but I think that the parent of your post had a more limited idea of 'anonymous' here.

Your ISP knows all the things you say they do, but so far as I know, no ISP does the kind of social/networking stuff with your information that Facebook, Yahoo, Google and company do. A government agency can get information from your ISP, but your ISP doesn't "share" anything through default-to-yes things like Buzz. (I may be wrong about this. Some ISPs may do this too.)

volomike• 16 years ago

What I didn't like about it was that by default it let everyone in my addressbook know many of my other clients. In fact, if you're a freelancer for anything, and you want to know most of the other freelancers that your client has contacted, just click his Buzz profile. There's a profile checkbox for this but for some reason Google left that on by default!

And let's say you had a bad client one day who wouldn't pay and you wanted to not deal with him. Well guess what -- he now has contact access to many of your other clients through the default settings in Buzz.

Heck, I was even seeing profiles out there where I could get access to someone's doctor.

I also dislike that when Buzz has a message and says (1) beside it, so does my Inbox too. I think the two should be distinctive. I ended up having to make a rule to trash anything going to my inbox beginning with "Buzz:".

thaumaturgy• 16 years ago

Eeee-yikes. I have a number of current clients in good standing, and one "bad" client from a while back that would just love this.

I've been migrating away from Google lately; the prospect of this just hurried me right along.

zhishaosiwei• 16 years ago

I like Greader. I like to comment to my notes, but I must share first then I can make comments. Why do you let me share first? why? sharing is not the nature of web!

ashish01• 16 years ago

I was also quite upset over a similar situation but now google seems to have made it easier to "block" people who follow you. As mentioned in this article

http://lifehacker.com/5470104/google-updates-explains-buzz-p...

Now there is a block link again anyone following you (once you unfollow them).

jrockway• 16 years ago

I don't get the outrage. Is there some flag in GMail that you flip to say "this person is stalking me, pretend they don't exist"? No.

So at this point, her public comments are being shared with one of the people that she talks to the most. This is a problem, but it's not something Google could have avoided.

My advice is to block this person, stop commenting on blogs if it is going to endanger her life (or use real anonynimization tools), and get a restraining order against the person she fears. People are easy to get rid of if you put enough effort into it, but what I've noticed from reading Ask Metafilter (and other things) is that people enjoy having problems and don't actually want to solve them. I feel that this person is doing the same thing, "drama drama me me me".

Let the downmods begin...

run4yourlives• 16 years ago

The default position of any social network when it comes to sharing personal information should not to, Period.

All "sharing" should be based on opt-in actions and not left to being opt-out. I've fully aware that many networks including the biggies like Facebook don't follow this mantra, but personal privacy laws (such as those that exist in Canada) should exist to enforce this fact.

gnubardt• 16 years ago

Her post on rape jokes was also very good: http://fugitivus.wordpress.com/2009/06/24/a-woman-walks-into...

A good reminder (or revelation) of why rape is never funny and should be taken seriously.

cabalamat2• 16 years ago

Can anyone tell me how I can (1) get off buzz, (2) not forward anytthing from me to anyone using buzz, (3) not have buzz appear in my gmail window? I've never opted in to buzz, don't want it, and don't want anything to do with it. There doesn't appear to be any obvious setting where I can get out of it.

aneesh• 16 years ago

At the bottom-center of your Gmail page, there is a link to "turn off buzz".

mbrubeck3• 16 years ago

First, open the "Buzz" label in GMail. Click on your list of followers and block all of them. Click on "connected sites" and remove any connections.

Now edit your Google profile (if you have one) and remove any information that you don't want public (including "display my full name"): http://www.google.com/profiles/me/editprofile?edit=b

Finally, go to the footer of the GMail site and click "turn off Buzz."

stevenbedrick• 16 years ago

But do make sure to do these steps in that order- clicking "turn off Buzz", as far as I can tell, only keeps you from seeing Buzz-related stuff, including the Buzz privacy and follow/follower settings. It doesn't disconnect you from those followers, hide your (by default) public or shared information, etc.

protomyth• 16 years ago

Stuff like this leads me to believe there is a pretty good business out there for a paid-by-the-user service. Google's real customers are advertisers not you.

Psyonic• 16 years ago

I can't vouch for it, but it already exists: http://www.lavabit.com/

danudey5• 16 years ago

'Lavabit was built for people like you. People who want a fast, reliable, private POP3 e-mail account with the most advanced features.'

POP3 account… with advanced features? I mean, I know they don't want to go IMAP because they don't want to store information on their servers, but it's still contradictory at first glance.

derwiki• 16 years ago

Not that I'd suggest a "run on the bank" ... but what's the easiest way to download a copy of all my GMail to load it into another service? (Linux or OS X, preferably command line util or Python script)

qjz2• 16 years ago

Gmail is accessible via IMAP: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...

Use the client of your choice to copy it to another account or download it to your computer.

godDLL6• 16 years ago

And if you have IMAP enabled, Buzz will show up there too, with replies to your posts looking like e-mails. There is a feature in Gmail Labs called "Advanced IMAP Controls", that lets you disable Buzz showing up in IMAP folders.

karlthepagan• 16 years ago

I think the biggest breach here is the forwarded emails. I have used email forwarding to maintain pseudo-anonymity (just barely, anyone with a brain can figure it out).

It is a valid breach in privacy and trust. Careless on Google's part to consider that use-case.

chubbard2• 16 years ago

The choice between privacy goes something like this on the internet these days. Be apart of the internet and give up all hope of privacy, or don't participate and be a Luddite. This choice is not acceptable or practical for any future.

Google grossly underestimated how important privacy has become to average user in last year or two. Unfortunately this could have been the killer feature that Buzz could leverage over Facebook and Twitter because they do such a horrible job at it. In fact Facebook's take on privacy has become down right scary. Privacy controls for Buzz could have been it's differentiator. Instead it's turned into the killer mistake threatening to bury Buzz before it even got out of the gate.

But, everyone screws up, everyone makes mistakes, it's all about how fast they fix it. So get some pizza, jolt, and strong coffee it should be a long weekend Google Buzz Engineers.

grourk• 16 years ago

It's a bit unfair to say that Twitter is bad at privacy. Twitter is public by its very nature. Google Buzz seems to be the same. Don't want to participate? Turn it off.

I would also disagree that Facebook's take on privacy is "downright scary," given the range of privacy settings you can choose. It's not some half-assed implementation on their part. Perhaps you take issue with the default settings?

No one set of privacy options will work for everyone for any of these tools. And when you choose to use one, you're responsible for what you say and do with it. So maybe the real issue is that Google decided to enable Buzz automatically. It was a choice they made, and I don't think it was necessarily the wrong one.

The only thing the Google Buzz Engineers should be working on this weekend is removing the huge lag for posts showing up in the feed.

chubbard2• 16 years ago

When the head of the company basically says people don't care as much about privacy as they once did. I call that scary. If he'd say we want you to participate fully in our service and we think that means your information is public it would be better.

But, I agree with the article that Facebook is really getting it wrong. Instead of having a default how about present them with a simple dialog. Explain the issues, and ask them what settings the user wants? Share with Everyone, Share with My Friends, etc.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_zuckerberg_sa...

Then the accusations that if you or one of your friends fills out a poll your information is shared with the poll author. (As noted on Twit Podcast). So yes I think those are some scary things.

xcombinator2• 16 years ago

to err is human, but to persevere is diabolical. errare humanum est, sed perseverare diabolicum. Seneca

To err is human, but to persevere in error is only the act of a fool. "Cujusvis hominis est errare, nullius nisi insipientis in errore perseverare". Cicero

Goronmon• 16 years ago

I wonder how much of all this security stuff around Buzz comes down to users having incorrect assumptions/knowledge about how applications and software handle privacy. It seems like a poor choice to make an assumption that any given application (including one from Google) is going to be able to know what level of privacy you expect by default.

Not to say that Google is blameless in this situation, as they could have done a lot more to educate potential Buzz users on privacy. However, it seems a common thread with the complains about Buzz and privacy start with someone making an incorrect assumption about how Google applications were handling their comments, shared feeds, friends, etc.

paul9290• 16 years ago

WoW by the look of all these comments made by us techies, Zuckerberg's comments "Public Is the New “Social Norm,” is so wrong!

http://mashable.com/2010/01/10/facebook-founder-on-privacy/#...

eplanit• 16 years ago

Google makes money by shoving ads in your face, or charging you for their service to shove ads in others' faces. Their power in this field is their expertise in exploiting the information that people so freely hand over to them.

They make no money protecting ones' privacy. If you can work your privacy into their business model, you'll have gained something. Good luck with that, though.

datums• 16 years ago

I thought about a few shitty scenarios, but this one didn't come to mind. Google calculated the risks and choose to have autofollow enabled. They knew what they were doing. I think they released it and waited and reacted. Venn diagram it, they have more users using their system because of it.

binarycheese• 16 years ago

I just found out I am following 27 people I have no idea who they are or why Google choose to make me follow them. I didn't even sign up for this Buzz thing. Google - this is really messed up!

godDLL6• 16 years ago

Yes it is, and you're not contributing to the discussion. Take a look at this guy, this is how it's done: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1121239

erratic• 16 years ago

Google is rolling out new privacy tweaks directly in response to this:

http://www.businessinsider.com/google-adding-two-privacy-fea...

jagjit• 16 years ago

What got me is switching buzz off does not disable people following you - you have to individually block people. They did a similar thing with searching through emails - there was no option to disable that feature.

It is like Google is saying - "We give you free services, so now we own all your data. And just so you know, we don't do evil - so pls don't judge."

Must be funny in the rich man's world. They are wasting away shareholders' profit share in their hubris or competitive fear.

invisible• 16 years ago

There needs to be a "make them person stop following me" option so I don't feel like such a dick when I block people. What's so wrong about that option? Also, why can't I block/force someone to stop following me if they don't have a google profile? What?

donaq2• 16 years ago

Well, Google followed up on it and she wrote another post about that. http://fugitivus.wordpress.com/2010/02/12/screw-you-google/

godDLL6• 16 years ago

> This blog is protected, to view it you must log in. <

I have a Wordpress account, but it doesn't seem to bring down the wall for me. Can you please quote an excerpt?

donaq2• 16 years ago

Huh. Sorry, I can't access it now either.

Groxx• 16 years ago

Hopefully Google is following some of these complaints. Personally, I'm adding feedback on their "disabling Buzz" help page: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...

They're doing serious damage to their image with this. I hope they wake up soon.

madars• 16 years ago

It seems it was pulled of the Internet, here's a copy - http://img38.imageshack.us/img38/329/harrietjacobsfuckyougoo...

godDLL6• 16 years ago

Official Google statement issued to businessinsider.com:

> We reached out to blogger in question this morning and addressed her concerns with Google Buzz and Google Reader. Some of the concerns were due to confusion the product experience created. Her report also helped us discover one bug and one product issue in Google Reader:

> 1) If you block people in Buzz, they still show up as following you in Reader. This is a bug, and we're working to fix it. Provided that your Google Reader shared items are protected, only the people you've explicitly allowed to see them can do so -- regardless of who appears to be following you in Reader.

> 2) Until now, there has not been functionality to block people from following you in Google Reader. We're adding this to the Reader interface.

> We are making these two changes as fast as possible and we'll get them live in the next few days.

Archived copy of the article in question: http://img38.imageshack.us/img38/329/harrietjacobsfuckyougoo...

godDLL6• 16 years ago

Google adds opt-in on sign-up, and easy opt-out later ("Disable Google Buzz Completely" in Gmail settings): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1123873

Automatically followed by abusive ex-husband (and his friends) on Google Buzz

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