Mountain View, California — There has been quite a buzz ever since Google unveiled “Buzz” their new social networking platform on February 9. Over the weekend, Google Inc. moved quickly and issued a mea culpa, after its first attempt to quell a growing outcry of criticism over Buzz’s privacy issues, saying it had made mistakes in how it launched its new social networking service Buzz. Responding to a sharp backfire from users and watchdogs, the Internet giant apologized for escalating concerns about the privacy of the product.
Having introduced its new Buzz service last week, imitating some of Twitter and Facebook, messed up the whole privacy that were anything other than comfortable, anything other than private. Considering the sensitivity of the matter, the company also released a public apology over the affair, which has given a new and very public focus to long-simmering concerns about the amount of information Google collects about its users and how it uses it.
Late Saturday, Todd Jackson, product manager for Gmail and Google Buzz, wrote in a blog post that Google had decided to alter one of the most fiercely attacked features in Buzz: the ready-made group of friends that Buzz offers new users based on their most frequent e-mail and chat contacts.
“We have heard your feedback loud and clear,” Jackson said in a blog post. He admitted Google’s decision to make automatic user lists public “created a great deal of concern,” and that an earlier attempt to deal with the problem by making it easier for users to hide their information “was clearly not enough”.
In the latest about-face, Jackson, who mentioned that the auto-follow feature had been aimed at making it easier to get started on Buzz, acknowledged the criticism that has been heaped on Google over the past few days:
“We quickly realized that we did not get everything quite right,” Jackson wrote in a blog post. “We are very sorry for the concern we have caused and have been working hard ever since to improve things based on your feedback. We’ll continue to do so.”
Many users just wanted to take a peep into Buzz and see if it would be useful to them, and were not content that they were already set up to follow people.
To begin with, when Buzz was introduced last week, among the first to hop on were the many who had been weighed down by the “heaviness” of Facebook or the “strangeness” of Twitter. One of them was Karthik Nagesh, a 35-year-old English lecturer, who has been shunning social network sites. “When I logged on to Gmail, I saw this Buzz thing. I just read the introduction, and said ok, and bingo, all the guys I was chatting with were right there on Buzz.”
This caused a great deal of apprehension and led people to think that Buzz had automatically displayed the people they were following to the world before they created a profile. Now, instead of automatically linking people, Google said it would give Gmail users, who are automatically enrolled in Buzz, the power to disable it.
Since Buzz social networks are made public by default, it meant that a user’s closest private e-mail contacts would be exposed publicly under the guise of being a list of “friends,” said Marc Rotenberg, head of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Speaking before Google backtracked, he said he planned to make a formal complaint to US regulators over the matter.
The backlash over Buzz, and Google’s scramble to contain it, has exposed a flaw in its approach to launching services.
Announcing Buzz, which will play a central part in its efforts to match Facebook and Twitter, Sergey Brin, co-founder, said the service was likely to evolve rapidly to reflect how people wanted to use it.
Jackson said Buzz would no longer automatically setup an online social network for users of its Gmail service by drawing from the list of people they most frequently exchange e-mail with. Rather, it will suggest people whom users might want to follow. Google will give users who have already signed up the same start-up screen as new users over the next two weeks, to give them a “second chance to review and confirm” the people they are following. Google will insert a Buzz tab in Gmail settings to make it easier for users to turn it off. Also, Buzz will no longer automatically connect Buzz to Picasa photo albums and Google Reader items, the company said.
Google is dropping the auto-follow model from Buzz and is moving to an auto-suggest model. (Credit: Google)
The changes, which was announced last week will be implemented over the next few days, were the latest Google had made to Buzz since it launched the product inside millions of Gmail accounts less than a week ago.