231–240 of 287 posts
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(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.
You're probably right but what would make them think this would be a tiny minority? Have these engineers never had ex-girlfriends?
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(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.
Agree that (b) is almost certain. Google had the decision to jump-start their social network in a big way at a cost of annoying maybe 1 in 100 gmail users who are conscious about this sort of thing. Seems like an obvious decision to a for-profit company. It raises questions in my mind about what data I am providing to Google and what unforeseen ways they may decide to use that data at some future point.
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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 thin…
You also would see the names of people that would comment on the items of people you were following in Reader, even if you weren't following them. So, I definitely see your point about names, but there were cases in Reader where this was already happening.
In any case, I turned on Buzz almost right away. I got to the first step and decided I needed to turn around and clean up my contacts list, I then turned it on. That could have easily been designed into the activation process.
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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…
"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." All the more reason to consider what is the best course to prevent similar mistakes in the future. Knee-jerk firings may make things worse.
Some lessons don't need to be learned from experience, and some screw ups are bad enough that they should result in real consequences.
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Obfuscated opt-out is pretty much the definition of 'evil'.
Hanlon's Razor comes to mind : "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." I doubt the google programmers are stupid but I would say that they probably were excited by the new feature that they are proud of and didn't think that people would want to opt out of it before even trying it.
(since it didn't seem to come through when the other guy posted it)
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This was their first interaction with Buzz. There was no opportunity to set any privacy settings. They are both Reader users, and did have limited sharing enabled there, but under what logic should those permissions ever extend to a completely new, different service with wholly different privacy concerns?
"Inferring privacy preferences for new software, based on prior actions in old software, is a recipe for failure." From this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1121034 Anyways, here is my take. Buzz isn't a new product so much as it's a new feature of Gmail. It's as much a new product as any new feature of Gmail is. It's also tied into most of the areas Gmail is, and tied into the rest of Google, and uses Go…
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?
Obscure.
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.
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it's common knowledge that many juries have ruled in favor of plaintiffs and defendants in lots of civil cases. No one needs to cite anything for this.
There's lots of common knowledge out there. The common knowledge which is true ought to be easily citeable. ;)
If you type "Jury trial" into bing, it #2's "in civil cases" and for that you get:
U.S. Constitution extend the rights to trial by jury
to include the right to jury trial for both criminal
and civil matters and a grand jury for serious cases
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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 ar…
It appears they may have foreseen the outcome and acted deliberately, if this thread at http://www.google.com/buzz/tmgrone/brHidEYC3jh/I-wish-Google... is any indication. In particular, see Brett Lider's response that includes this excerpt: 'Similar to Facebook being willing to "piss its users off" when it feels the need to make a big change in its service for the long-term good, I see Buzz in Gmail as a relative big…
Thinking about this, it seems like Google and Yahoo have been really envying what is effectively Facebook's captive audience. With Facebook, you sign up for "social networking" is essentially an undefined product whose provider has undefined obligations to you.
Email involves some explicitly or implicitly understood bounds and so doesn't let the provider sell it users to the same degree - well, unless the email provide just flagrantly violates their implicit obligations - and so the temptation is greater and greater.
This is the sort of thing that was absolutely predictable.
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.