…Buzz was only tested internally and bypassed more extensive trials with external testers…<\/p>\n
“We’ve been testing Buzz internally at Google for a while. Of course, getting feedback from 20,000 Googlers isn’t quite the same as letting Gmail users play with Buzz in the wild.” <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The biggest problem was the automatic creation of a circle of “friends” based on who users most frequently emailed. So, for instance, your spouse, the person you are having an affair with, your boss down at the police station, your bookie, and the paypal account you set up specifically for pornography and sex toy purchases. These “friends” all get to see each other and can interact and stuff.<\/p>\n
This also opened up the distinct possibility of, for instance, human rights activists getting Yahoo’ed.<\/p>\n
Evgeny Morozov, a Belarus-born researcher and blogger who looks at the political implications of the internet [noted]:<\/p>\n
“If I were working for the Iranian or the Chinese government, I would immediately dispatch my internet geek squads to check on Google Buzz accounts for political activists and see if they have any connections that were previously unknown to the government,” he wrote <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This is all very interesting. This is a prime example of something many people have feared: Google gone bad, though I don’t think in this case on purpose. The possibility that one day you can wake up and discover that something as basic as your email system has suddenly been integrated into a publicly visible Facebook-like system that you didn’t even know was being planned is scary. Google still maintains, according to the BBC report, that the integration of Gmail and Buzz is still the best way to do this, although they may offer a separate service. But it isn’t the best way. Having it be possible to integrate Buzz and Gmail is nice, I suppose. But having something like Buzz, which is not email, and is entirely different, suddenly attached to your email system is like having your on-screen “Post-It” notes become a blog which, if you want, and if you even know it exists, can be made private, if you know what you are doing.<\/p>\n
Do you know where all your Gmail accounts are right now, and if any of them are “Buzzed”?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Well, that is not a direct quote, but Google has admitted that the early version of Google Buzz had serious flaws related to privacy, and this may be related to Google having skipped a step with its testing process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[57],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5fhV1-6zf","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25249"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25249"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25249\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}