So Google launched their Twitter/MySpace/Facebook killer, Buzz, and appar­ently sub­scribed every GMail user to it with­out ask­ing any­one for permission.

The result is that a lot of peo­ple now have sen­si­tive per­sonal infor­ma­tion float­ing around in pub­lic. An exam­ple of this (found via ArsTech­nica) is this woman, who starts her post like this:

I use my pri­vate Gmail account to email my boyfriend and my mother.

There’s a BIG drop-off between them and my other “most fre­quent” contacts.

You know who my third most fre­quent con­tact is?

My abu­sive ex-husband.

Which is why it’s SO EXCITING, Google, that you AUTOMATICALLY allowed all my most fre­quent con­tacts access to my Reader, includ­ing all the com­ments I’ve made on Reader items, usu­ally shared with my boyfriend, who I had NO REASON to hide my cur­rent loca­tion or work­place from, and never did.

Ouch.

Oth­ers, with less at stake per­son­ally, are also pissed:

See, I love the idea of neat new tech inno­va­tions that lead to stream­lined com­mu­ni­ca­tion, real-time updat­ing, in-line video and photo post­ing, and super­sim­ple friend and con­tact inte­gra­tion. I do not, how­ever, like a prod­uct that bursts through my door like a tor­nado and opts me in to wan­ton in-box clut­ter and spam (or, more pre­cisely, bacn) pub­licly reveals my per­sonal con­tact list with­out ask­ing me, threat­ens to broad­cast my e-mail address any­time some­one wants to @ me in a Buzz, and even appears to grab pho­tos off my Android phone that I’ve never uploaded.

or this one

So…yeah, I guess I’m on Google Buzz. It’s linked to my Picasa and Word­Press accounts, so you can fol­low every­thing I do. Cause that’s not creepy or any­thing. The best part is that the defaults for every­thing are pub­lic, and you end up broad­cast­ing to a bunch of ran­dom peo­ple unless you sit down and sort through. I’m expect­ing this to back­fire for a bunch of peo­ple, and not just even­tu­ally but almost imme­di­ately. It might not be a bad idea to start a bet­ting pool on when the first child porn charges are filed as some high­school stu­dent acci­den­tally sends her­self to the entire school.

I could go on, but I really don’t want this to turn into some kind of link farm.

I’m not per­son­ally affected by this. I do have a GMail account, and yes, they opted me in to Buzz, but the account con­tains no per­sonal infor­ma­tion what­so­ever, and no per­sonal emails. I use it exclu­sively as a dump­ing ground for spam, and form mails I don’t want clut­ter­ing up my real email inbox. I’ve never even sent an email from the account.

I use the Google search engine, but I am not signed in to it, and have never cre­ated a pro­file or a cus­tomized home­page on it. I’m sure they could still iden­tify me just by exam­in­ing cook­ies or my IP address, but at least they’d have to work for it. And it’s not like my Google searches are state secrets any­way. As long as peo­ple are not able to search for my name and bring up a list of every­thing I’ve searched for, I’m satisfied.

I also use Google Ana­lyt­ics for this blog. I feel OK about that because this blog is already my pub­lic face on the inter­net. Google already knows a lot about it sim­ply by index­ing it for their search engine. I have no prob­lem with them gen­er­at­ing sta­tis­tics on where my vis­i­tors come from, as long as they make the infor­ma­tion avail­able to me too. The only sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion asso­ci­ated with this blog is my login pass­word, and I’m pretty sure Google doesn’t have that. And they’re not get­ting it, even if they launched a GPass­word ser­vice tomorrow.

I use the Word­Press soft­ware, but not hosted on WordPress.com. I don’t use Picasa or Google Reader. I don’t use Google Documents.

So all in all, yes, Google cer­tainly knows a lot of frag­ments of infor­ma­tion about me. Google searches can turn up quite a bit, they can col­lect a few more bits and pieces through cook­ies when I use their search engine, and they have a lot of sta­tis­tics on who reads my blog. But they can’t read my emails. They don’t have any really sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion about me. Noth­ing related to my work, per­sonal life or stud­ies is tied to Google.

And this brings us to the point of this post:

Don’t blame Buzz, blame GMail

A lot of peo­ple are furi­ous at Google for the mix­ture of incom­pe­tence and indif­fer­ence towards users’ pri­vacy with which Buzz was launched, and while that might be jus­ti­fied, it is miss­ing a fun­da­men­tal point.

Buzz is just doing what Google does best, what they’ve always done, and what they should be doing. Here’s what Google’s own web­site has to say on the company’s mission:

Google’s mis­sion: to orga­nize the world’s infor­ma­tion and make it uni­ver­sally acces­si­ble and useful

Google is ded­i­cated to mak­ing infor­ma­tion uni­ver­sally acces­si­ble. For a lot of infor­ma­tion, that’s a good thing. Their search engine turned the inter­net upside down — for the first time ever, users were able to actu­ally find the infor­ma­tion they needed. Google is good at this, and we’ve ben­e­fited hugely from it.

And social net­work­ing is right up Google’s alley as well: Social net­work­ing is all about mak­ing infor­ma­tion about you and me acces­si­ble to the world in an orga­nized man­ner. A lot of Facebook’s pop­u­lar­ity relies on their abil­ity to ana­lyze our exist­ing rela­tions, friend­ships and net­works, and use this to sug­gest new friends. My Twit­ter would be use­less if I couldn’t fol­low the peo­ple I wanted to keep up with, and if oth­ers couldn’t find my tweets through searches. Buzz is sim­ply more of the same, and there is noth­ing wrong with that. It’s another social net­work­ing ser­vice, and Google is exactly the right com­pany to do some­thing like this. No one is bet­ter at orga­niz­ing infor­ma­tion and telling us exactly what we want to know.

The prob­lem is that another of their ser­vices is not so well suited for the com­pany. Email is some­thing almost every­one con­sid­ers per­sonal and pri­vate. Even the US gov­ern­ment, in its des­per­ate war on peo­ple who wear tur­bans, speak funny and pray to Allah, has only given itself per­mis­sion to sniff the sub­ject lines of people’s mails sent over GMail. This is con­sid­ered the equiv­a­lent of read­ing the enve­lope, with­out open­ing it and look­ing at the let­ter inside. Because that let­ter is per­sonal. And so are the bod­ies of our emails.

But if we con­sider our emails to be sen­si­tive per­sonal infor­ma­tion, then why do so many peo­ple entrust them to a com­pany whose stated mis­sion is “to make the world’s infor­ma­tion uni­ver­sally acces­si­ble”?

A com­pany like that should never be entrusted with our sen­si­tive information.

Face­book has made some major blun­ders regard­ing pri­vacy, but their mis­sion seems to be some­thing like “can’t we just all get along”. In Facebook’s per­fect world, every­one are friends with every­one else. This doesn’t excuse their pri­vacy issues, but at least it tells us that they’re not directly opposed to the idea of pri­vacy. They’re just clumsy and don’t think things through.

Google, how­ever, is dif­fer­ent. In the per­fect Google world, pri­vacy does not exist. In Google’s dream world, I could go take a look at Bill Gates’ emails or Steve Jobs’ search his­tory. or Bono’s shop­ping list. It is infor­ma­tion. It should be made avail­able to the world.

So no, there’s noth­ing wrong with Google Buzz. It should absolutely broad­cast every­thing Google knows about us to the world. The prob­lem is that Google has been given sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion in the first place. Google shouldn’t know any­thing about us that can’t safely be pub­lished through Buzz. If GMail had never existed, Google would not know that the woman in the first exam­ple has received emails from her abu­sive ex-husband, and so they couldn’t have caused her any prob­lems. The only things Buzz would have known about us would be what we told it.

Imag­ine if Twit­ter or Face­book had been built by Google, based on their search engine and their abil­ity to cat­e­go­rize and orga­nize infor­ma­tion. That is what Buzz could poten­tially become, and that’d be noth­ing short of amaz­ing. At least as long as we all take care to keep our emails and other sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion far away from Google.

Don’t opt out of Buzz because of pri­vacy con­cerns. Opt out of GMail instead. Expect every new ser­vice Google launches to do as Buzz. Their mis­sion is to make all infor­ma­tion avail­able to the world, and they’re going to keep try­ing. You’re fight­ing a los­ing bat­tle. You can keep opt­ing out of their ser­vices till the cows come home. It’s always a tem­po­rary solu­tion at best. Instead, fix the root issue: Make sure Google is not given any sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion about you in the first place.

Tags: buzz, facebook, google, privacy, twitter

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