Google Buzz Abandons Auto-Following Amid Privacy Concerns
As we noted this morning, Google isn’t wasting any time in responding to user criticism about Buzz. Now they’ve rolled out another set of changes to further address Buzz’s privacy issues. The biggest change involves the automatic follow system: it’s now being switched to a suggestion model, where Google will present you with a list of friends it thinks you’d like to follow, but gives you a chance to deselect them before you start using the service.
That’s a pretty big change — when Buzz launched four days ago, one of its selling points was that it took no work on the user’s part to get started, because Buzz would automatically follow the people you interact with most on Gmail. Of course, that isn’t always a good thing — there are plenty of cases when you wouldn’t want people to know who you’d been communicating with. After an initial backlash Google made it easier to hide which users you were following, but now they’re ditching the auto-follow model entirely. Fortunately it only takes a minute to go through the suggestions, so it’s not much of a hurdle.
View full post on TechCrunch
9 Responses to “Google Buzz Abandons Auto-Following Amid Privacy Concerns”
February 13th, 2010 saat: 7:14 pm
“Can you imaging the consequences for business competitors, cheating spouses, or people playing sick so they could stay home from work and work on their blogs?”
Quite frankly if you are a cheating spouse or pretending to be sick to get time off work, then you deserve to be outed.
February 13th, 2010 saat: 7:46 pm
Oh, what’s the worry? Google will soon change their mind again on their latest policies.
February 13th, 2010 saat: 7:58 pm
I love how they are adjusting and moving so fast, just like a lean and mean startup
February 13th, 2010 saat: 8:56 pm
Google buzz seems like an interesting idea but if you don’t want some of your contacts following you on Buzz it seems that you have to block them from all the Google apps, including Gmail.
It’s a shame that Buzz is getting so much bad publicity (which all have valid points) because I really liked Google and all their apps.
February 13th, 2010 saat: 9:44 pm
Here is the link http://buzztweep.com
They asked me to take down and now the site is using another way to tweet/buzz at same time..
February 13th, 2010 saat: 10:27 pm
Good thing I don’t have Gmail and I won’t be getting it in the future.
February 13th, 2010 saat: 11:19 pm
While I’m not completely sold on Buzz, its awesome to see Google moving fast in response to (valid) criticism. When was the last time we saw a big honkin’ company take less than a month to do anything?
February 13th, 2010 saat: 11:48 pm
These privacy concerns are real. I’m surprised that Google simply overlooked the consequences of the original default configurations.
Allowing others to see who you were communicating with was a critical error.
Can you imaging the consequences for business competitors, cheating spouses, or people playing sick so they could stay home from work and work on their blogs?
On my website, we take privacy very seriously and integrate with Google in a number of areas. Considering the stringent requirements that Google has, I’m very shocked they didn’t follow their own prescriptions for privacy that they roll out with all their widgets and API’s.
Cheers,
CarbonPig.com
February 14th, 2010 saat: 12:08 am
I see Google has an option to disconnect and delete Buzz; however, it say DELETE your Google profile with that option…
What if you want to delete Buzz and keep your Google profile?
~maybe the testing just involved server capacity for real-time communication…
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