Google Buzz is the Worst Tech Launch Ever
I’m not mad at Google Buzz because it wants to be another social network service that gathers stuff from me and splat it out all over the Internet. That’s awesome. My problem with it is that it may be a product launch that will actually reduce the amount of technological progress we make as a whole.
The immediate fallout of Buzz is that now we can no longer expect any part of a web based e-mail system to be private. It never really was; I don’t doubt that web based e-mail services have been selling information to spammers and we know that Google harvests message contents to show us ads. That’s fine. But to blatantly slap their power in all the users’ faces is not. Yeah, we know you can do this, but don’t rub it in our faces and call it a good thing.
From the parental/teacher standpoint a bigger problem with Buzz is that everything is automatic. With Facebook and Myspace there is a key component to a breach of privacy: you have to provide the information before it can be leaked to someone you do not want to see the information. Just like we teach our kids, if you don’t put it on your Facebook profile nobody will know about it but assume you will have no control over it once it’s there. Buzz is changing that game. Relevant data that you did not actively generate is now shared with others. The part that the Internet is focused on is that I can be “friends” (networked through a bi-directional edge) with someone simply because they harassed me and I replied telling them not to harass me. The most prominent case of this being that of a woman who gets harassed by men who think it’s cool to rape her suddenly having her entire contact list (including her mother’s e-mail address) exposed to all those people. When you have a software rollout that may result in facilitating capital crimes it’s a little more than an oops. It does immediate damage. Also, it kills trust.
This brings me to the reason that I absolutely hate Google Buzz is probably the same reason Google itself hates it at this point: it completely destroys trust in Google’s services. We’re on the verge of great technological innovation with what Google’s been doing. Google Apps is amazing. Google Docs is an exceptionally useful piece of technology. Many schools and non-profits have switched to or are switching to Google Apps from the traditional Novell/Lotus/Exchange/FirstClass/whatever models they’ve been using. But now that Google has demonstrated that it can and will create a gaping (physical) security hole for all 150 million plus of its users for the sake of a product that isn’t very good I wonder if sysadmins and administrators will continue to trust Google with Google Apps. I surely won’t; not to the degree that I currently do anyway. And that’s really, really sad because Google Apps is a great piece of technology.
Sure, not everything Google does was a hit. Take Wave. When Google rolled out Wave it was disappointing, but we can live with (or without) it. Some people liked it, some didn’t, the usual people whined about it, Google probably learned a lot from the launch. Nothing of significance happened. Great.
But when Buzz came about not only are people directly harmed by it but I’m afraid that progress itself will be slowed down because people who make decisions (and when you’re in the education sector, these decisions are about children) will now be less willing to take risks with Google. I doubt enough people will abandon Google’s innovations to actually make humanity as a whole go backwards in information technology, but some order of change down the line has just became negative and eventually we’ll feel its impact.
I’m not sure if any other company can have this kind of impact. Take Microsoft. If nobody trusts Windows 7 because it’s known that there’s some major privacy flaw built in we’ll just keep using XP. No big deal. The way Windows 7 handles everything isn’t completely revolutionary compared to XP. The same applies for software patches. Sometimes a new Office patch introduces a security flaw but, hey, just don’t download it and wait for the next one. It’s not like you really needed the patch to fix the garbled text in Turkish in the help file that nobody reads anyway.
Devindra reminded me of Cuil, which was described as the worst launch ever. Well, Cuil never did any damage. We poked at it, we laughed at it, and it was left to die. Some folks lost a lot of money and some folks lost a lot of time. But as a whole, society never lost anything except maybe for the ten minutes it took to make fun of Cuil displaying X-rated images for innocent searches. Buzz, that did real damage to both individuals and, in a less tangible sense, society, and it’s going to last.
Google is trying to change the game like it did with GMail and Apps and Voice and all the other stuff that I don’t use. When you say “I don’t trust Docs so I’ll just keep using Word and e-mail files back and forth” that’s a big step forwards not taken. I don’t think I can honestly defend Google anymore even when their software is the best for a situation because in applications like e-mail and document sharing privacy has a near-infinite utility value. And, well, I don’t like that.
I must say I did enjoy your perspective. People perceive Gmail as Email. Why they thought it was a good idea to force everyone into a social network is beyond me.
Where they thinking about the privacy of thier users?
Where they thinking about employers who don’t want people on social networks?
Where they thinking about system admins for small business who previously vouched for the professionalism of Gmail?
Where they thinking about the Chinese Activists contact list which they were so vehemently protecting just a few short weeks ago?
Where they thinking about any professional who needs to maintain a private connection with anyone?
Google just turned thousands of people’s worlds inside out like it was nothing.
I think this is deeply routed in their culture. They don’t respect people privacy. Period. They were so relaxed about it they figured they could do whatever they wanted.
Great move Google… I actually think they stand a chance of losing more business than gaining it at this point.
Thanks James. I completely forgot about those Chinese activists! That’s a major, major problem there.
I agree. I’m a huge fan of Google but the Buzz rollout was a terrible misstep. What’s reassuring to me though is that the public backlash has forced Google to make some changes. I don’t think their developers ever expected this kind of anger, and there’s nothing like an immediate, scathing public humiliation to keep a company’s hubris in check.
This post has it all wrong. I repeat– all wrong.
The first thing I’d like to comment on is that the link regarding the sexual harassment leads to a page which is not in public view…which makes the claim seem dubious at best.
But more to the point. The default settings of Google’s Buzz leave your profile nearly blank, without exposing whom your following or not following; without showing your contact information or anything within the ‘About Me’ column.
One has to opt-in to all these information exposing efforts. In the case of sysadmins using Google’s App system, it remains unclear whether or not Buzz is something that can be switched on or off. As someone who’s used the gmail-like interface of private organizations, I must say that while they’re all capable of mimicking native Gmail exactly, most often do not, leaving some features turned on and others turned off.
Without being a Google apologist, I must say that I haven’t heard or read of any large-scale security or information breaches since Buzz was announced/released. There are quite a lot of choices Buzz presents first time users with to keep information locked down and in its place. It’s also clear that while Buzz’s interface lays within Gmail’s in the desktop experience, that Google does not share anyone’s email information with people…period.
Buzz is an attempt by Google to wrap their new and existing communications and file sharing technologies into one interface that people will actually use. They’ve brought stuff from Wave, Latitude, Voice Search and so-on into their popular Gmail interface. The system works by allowing people who would otherwise not be on facebook or twitter, access to a non-email communication tool that allows them to share their whimsical ideas, photos, etc. with the people they already communicate with most.
Is the auto-following algorithm foolproof? No. But it certainly doesn’t share your contact and other info with people you don’t mean for it to without the box. As is the case with anything, one has to take a look and see who their ‘friends’ with, and what they’re sharing with them.
Certainly Facebook’s privacy administration settings are more robust, but then again, they’re likely to change such settings on a whim, with only a pop-up’s notice.
I think this post needs some serious editing– not simply in terms of presumptuous content, but also in terms of sentence structure.