Whether you like it or loathe it, Google’s new Buzz social sharing system has hit the headlines in a particularly catastrophic way over and over in the week since its launch.
Though Google has moved to adjust some of the issues, some of the damage is already done. Google’s usual trick of data-mining and automating some of the process (a trick it uses elsewhere in its other services) directly exposes to public view some data that many Google users would prefer to remain private—thanks to the auto-populated friends list that Buzz used to deliver to you on login.
The issue is that Google’s coders seem to have put zero thought into the secondary effects of this automated social grouping—the biggest concern of which is that your friends list was exposed for all to see, and that communications which you may have been having with some people in private suddenly became public.
There are other issues too, and most recently it’s been revealed that there’s an issue with phishing scams via the Buzz-Twitter link, and a big privacy/security loophole that exposes your geolocation if you Buzz, whether or not you want to reveal this info.
Will Google Buzz Go the Way of Facebook Beacon? | Technomix | Fast Company
SO Google is… evil? Is that what we’re saying here?
Who’da thunk.
