Saturday, February 13, 2010

Some Of Your Privacy Concerns With Gmail Buzz

I wanted to highlight some of the concerns voices in comments to the last privacy related post about Gmail Buzz:

• Reid says: “The basic reason that the Buzz privacy is still a problem is that I don’t have control over where I show up. I can’t decide whether I show up in a list of followers on someone else’s public profile: I have to rely on that other person turning off that option, which most people are probably not going to think to do ... Likewise for any comments. If I comment on a public item, my comment (along with my full name) shows up on that person’s public profile, no matter how private I’ve made *my* account.”
• Richardt points to an article over at TechCrunch, where Erick Schonfeld writes: “It turns out there is another privacy flaw in Google Buzz that can expose private email addresses to everyone who follows you. Google Buzz borrows the @reply convention from Twitter so that if you want to reply to someone or direct a comment to them you simply put the @ sign in front of their name. Google autosuggests names from your contact list as you start typing. Normally, this doesn’t cause any problems if you select the Gmail account or chat name associated with that person’s public profile. It ends up posting their name, and not their email address ... But if you select a name or account that is not public, Buzz will fill in with their private email.”
• Zts writes: “I do not want Google to think it knows who I want to be friends with, and automatically link me up with those people. I do not want my private email to become a social network. I have tried very hard to keep these kinds of services separate. I have always trusted gmail with sensitive information, and things like this could erode that trust. When trust is gone it is very hard to get back.” (To explain the linking up in Buzz: following others is opt-in – albeit in opt-in you’re really being pushed to, per Google’s interface decisions – but them following you isn’t, if I understand it correctly...)
• JDP points to a post by Harriet Jacobs, where Harrier writes: “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.” (Does anyone know what happened? Was her Reader sharing misconfigured by her and are public Reader sharings then automatically suggested to frequent contacts in Buzz?)
• Shelley: “I’m now working on moving my GMail related actively elsewhere.”
• Jake says: “I’m an IT security guy and I had trouble picking through all of the details and various user interfaces to get thing tweaked they way I wanted. The average Google user is going to be lost and will leak information for which there will be real consequences.”
• Anonymous writes: “I was connected to people and vice versa, I called them, none of us had heard of BUZZ. Turning off BUZZ hides the feature only – no way to know if it’s off.”
• G-Man says: “Suppose a bunch of your contacts innocently choose to follow you? If your followers are all from a particular area, then anyone who views your profile can guess roughly where you live. If they include therapists or divorce lawyers, then anyone who views your profile can guess how your personal life is going.”

Please comment in the existing thread.

[Thanks all who commented!]

Some Of Your Privacy Conc ... by Philipp Lenssen

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