Comments on: Without owning up to its privacy blunder, Google announces future fixes to Buzz

By: Manuel

Manuel — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 04:59:47 +0000

You might want to spend nearly an hour of your time watching the video of the “Google Buzz Launch Event.” The gmail and buzz manager, Todd Jackson, his boss, Bradley Horowitz, Vice President for Product Management, Vic Gundrota, Vice President for Engineering, and Sergei Brin appear. It is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuThg91-4Nw

You were right: they tested buzz in-house and are very pleased with it (or at least Sergey Brin is). They rolled buzz to gmail subscribers knowing full well that it wasn’t ready for prime time but did so with the expectation that users would provide useful feedback. Of course, the experiment has backfired spectacularly.

By: ashley

ashley — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 19:03:23 +0000

excellent post. The problem is not just the fact that they messed it up, but that they did not think about user’s privacy. Seems there is some fundamental problem about the way Google perceives their user’s privacy. Coupled with web history issues and Eric Schmidt’s statements, the whole thing makes me feel insecure about google.

By: Manuel

Manuel — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 17:33:23 +0000

I just posted a comment in google’s help forum on buzz. It might be useful if you do the same just so they get another thoughtful “suggestion.”

Again, thank you for keeping an eye on this.

(FWIW, the link to the forum is http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/label?lid=3a63236689cf8dbd&hl=en and I posted to the “How to be invisible…” thread)