Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

fugitivus.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 287 posts

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

#141

Post by danudey »

ConceptDog wrote: post #130
anigbrowl wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

It sounds like there are two issues here. First, that Google assumed that because they were 'frequent contacts' that they were best friends, and thus him and all his jackass friends were made followers on her Google Reader.

The second is that all the people that frequently contact HER (via an anonymous account which forwards to her Google account) now have her personal Gmail account and are following her on Buzz (and Google Reader), which she can't stop from happening.

The problem is that Google's assumed that anyone with whom you correspond frequently is a friend with whom you're willing to share all of your data, when in reality a lot of people are forced to correspond with people whom they don't like at all, and that Google shouldn't be saying 'Hey, we've created a new thing called Buzz, and we've told everyone all about you on your behalf!'

Edit: also worth mentioning: you don't 'make someone a contact' in Gmail, Google does it for you automatically whenever you e-mail someone. Also, she didn't give Google information that they were in a relationship, Google just did this automatically. Even people that she e-mailed from an anonymous address via gmail got access to her profile. Google basically gave everyone her personal info without asking if it was ok, and now she can't take it back.

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

#143

Post by pasbesoin »

jamesbritt wrote: post #111
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 id…

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.

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

#144

Post by sker »

pavs wrote: post #61
dkersten wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not for me. They just said "The following people have been added automatically..." At least, I did not manually add anyone and I had a bunch of people added.

I am pretty sure you are mistaken. This is the prompt everyone got when they went to buzz for the first time: http://www.digitaltrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/goog... This is also shown in the Google buzz demo video. Responsibility lies on you when you decide not to edit the follow users and check privacy setting when its right in front of you the first time. The only way forward is to click OK, thats what you…

Why is he being down-voted? (-3 at the moment)

Oh right, "we don't like his comment, let's get rid of it." Jesus, people, behave.

He's making his case based on his knowledge of the situation and he's doing so in an educated manner.

Me, personally, I'm in his same situation. I can't understand how people got automatically added to that Buzz thing. The link appeared in my Gmail account and I never clicked it, NEVER. I just turned it off when I learned how.

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

#145

Post by danudey »

aswanson wrote: post #47

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

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.

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

#146

Post by jasonlotito »

jfager wrote: post #140
jasonlotito wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being an HN reader doesn't make someone immune to being wrong. At some point, the user has to take responsibility. Every complaint I've read that discusses this has mentioned not using Google Profiles to modify privacy settings previously. Either that, or it wasn't mentioned at all. So, I go back to what I was saying: did anyone using the privacy settings available have their privacy setting explicitly overridden, or…

This morning, I've watched two coworkers open their gmail accounts for the first time since Buzz went live. In both cases, they clicked "No thanks, take me to my inbox" instead of the button to "Check out Buzz", and in both cases, Buzz was enabled anyways, and a bunch of people were listed as following/followers. We looked at their profiles, and all the followers/ees were publicly listed. What, exactly, should they h…

They were using their profile privacy settings, and it violated it, or was it more a case of the feature enabling itself in Gmail and using existing privacy settings?

Edit: And because it needs to be said here: I'm not suggesting enabling Buzz and then using existing privacy settings as a bases for how Buzz works is right. I'm just asking a question.

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

#147

Post by sker »

jasonlotito wrote: post #32
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…

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.

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.

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

#148

Post by nfnaaron »

Tawheed wrote: post #83

Class action lawsuit?

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.

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

#149

Post by mbrubeck »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #120
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 wit…

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...

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

#150

Post by wyclif »

benatkin wrote: post #15

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.)

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.

Post reply on HN