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

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

#111

Post by jamesbritt »

pasbesoin wrote: post #99

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 wh…

"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.

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

#112

Post by ConceptDog »

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.

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

#113

Post by volomike »

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:".

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

#115

Post by Pistos2 »

raganwald wrote: post #79

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 th…

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.

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

#116

Post by Vivtek »

goodside wrote: post #74
rwhitman wrote: post #6

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 rig…

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.

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".

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

#117

Post by maqr »

pilif wrote: post #91
mechanical_fish wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

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 st…

I'm also having a hard time understanding the issue here. Is any private data (besides social relationship data) being 'published' that wasn't available before via a simple Google search?

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

#118

Post by Vivtek »

pasbesoin wrote: post #101
goodside wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Totally preventable and entirely foreshadowed by Facebook's failures to think about the same damn issues.

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

#119

Post by jfager »

mattmcknight wrote: post #109
jfager wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 jarrin…

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…

The problem is that Buzz automatically adds email contacts as followers, and then publically displays who all of your other followers/ees are. So, if you were sharing items in Reader with a small group, once Buzz went live, you were also sharing them with everyone who was automatically added, and they could see who else you were sharing them with. Completely unacceptable.

Integration with Android and Picasa make things even worse: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31322_3-10451428-256.html

Plus, you can easily inadvertently expose other people's private email addresses because of their incredibly stupid ui: http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/11/reply-google-buzz-exposing-...

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

#120

Post by waterlesscloud »

ConceptDog wrote: post #112

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 s…

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.

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