Google’s Anti-Buzz: Too Much Publicy?

Looks like Google has run afoul of people’s publicy concerns: too much information being outed. Also, it seems that people don’t want to follow their landlord, and other people they interact with though email:

- Joshua Brustein, The Negative Buzz Around Google’s New Social Network

Google’s new social networking service, Buzz, has been live for just two days. But it is already drawing fire for what some are describing as a “huge privacy flaw.”

By default, the service scans your Gmail contact list to create your Buzz social network. The problem is that that this process turns your contacts into public information, which upsets some users.

“If I were working for the Iranian or the Chinese government, I would immediately dispatch my Internet geeksquads to check on Google Buzz accounts for political activists and see if they have any connections that were previously unknown to the government,” wrote Evgeny Morozov on Foreign Policy’s Net.Effect blog.

Even those not at risk of crossing hostile governments may not want their contact lists made public. Nor do they necessarily want to follow or be followed by people they e-mail often. One commenter on Google’s help forum, for instance, complained that he was automatically connected to his landlord.

As a late entrant to social networking, Buzz is trying to get off to a fast start by tapping the connections that users have already made through Google’s other services. But critics argue that Google should ask for permission before automatically including those contacts in the Buzz social network.

The overlap between our email and open social discourse is perhaps smaller for many than Google anticipated. And there may be a large anti-social network in our emails, like the landlord example, or the guy involved in an acrimonious divorce.

Why didn’t Google go with a clean slate, 100% opt in? Seems like a big misstep.