Onward thur the Cloud - Technology Integration Adventures: Why Google Buzz confirmed our two worst fears about Google | Tech Sanity Check

Why Google Buzz confirmed our two worst fears about Google | Tech Sanity Check | TechRepublic.com
- Google’s joy ride with users could be coming to end. In fact, it may have officially happened with the introduction of Google Buzz.
- Google is sitting on the largest collection of personal information on the planet (and very likely, the largest in the history of the planet). Google knows far more about you than the government does
- When Google Buzz first launched, it surprised users by turning their contacts that they emailed most often in Gmail into Google Buzz friends. By default, this list of friends was exposed to the world through the person’s Google Profile and these automatic friends were also treated to access to the person’s Google Reader, exposing the stuff they were reading.
- For many people, that Google account tied to Gmail and other private services was not one that they wanted to expose out in the wild
- Beyond the bit about anonymizing data, Google has never divulged many details about its internal policies for protecting user privacy. Google’s promise to users has always been something like: “Trust us. We’ll always keep the needs of users as our top priority.”
- However, in the process of trying to make users the top priority and create a better user experience, Google was extremely careless about the overall privacy implications of Buzz. That naturally makes me wonder how serious they are about privacy in general and it makes me question the policies and procedures Google has in place to protect privacy