Google Buzz leaves privacy concerns ringing in ears What’s that really annoying humming sound bothering your lugholes? Oh yes, Google Buzz. Bah. And so it has come to pass - Mountain View’s sinister personal data grab has finally crept into the most sacred of all online communication tools. Gmail now has the ability to do social networking. Google wants to out-Facebook …
@Gerard Krupa
I don't have a profile set up with my Google Mail account but can use Android services without trouble so you don't need to create a profile. Comments left on the marketplace don't have to contain any personal information at all, no real names or contact details (it uses your first name or whatever you put in the first name field). I also have yet to be pestered by Google to create a profile but should they do so and I have no choice but to fill in some details, I'll make it up as usual.
I personally find the likes of Hotmail and Yahoo far more invasive in their requests for personal information but then I use these accounts more often than my free Google one but do concede Google is creepy in the depths they go to in harvesting personal information from your internet usage for sure.
"Gmail users that their inbox won’t be sabotaged by spammers."
<sarcasm alert>
Spammers, really?
Didn't you know that via Eric Schmidt that there is nothing bad on the net and if you wanted to keep your private details, er well private, than you shouldn't be doing that on the net in the first place?
Shame on you El Reg for promoting 'evil' things on the 'net...
</sarcasm alert>
C'mon, anyone who uses Google's e-mail, etc should know by now that Big brother is watching you. And by big brother I'm talking about Google itself.
I've never understood this narcissistic need to inform all and sundry that your boy / girlfriend / husband / wife / dog / cat / neighbor / inanimate carbon rod is a rockstar douchbag saint. Nor why the average foodtube considers free services to be safe and secure and above reproach.
So you all think that the other FREE (yes free no charge) email providers are not keeping your information? If you are use electronic devices, bank cards, the internet - you've left tracks, your privacy is shot.
Remember that time when you accidentaly typed porn into a search engine? Used your credit card? Your mobile phone? When somebody forwarded an email from you to all his friends with your details still included? Some idiot published you email in a publicly accessable document? Walked through an airport, a train station, or shopping centre? Posted on TheRegister?
You have no privacy unless you are an autistic hermit, living in a desert, eating and crapping sand, with no electronic communications and who knows nobody.
It is the 21st century, privacy is gone, it wil get worse - JUST GET OVER IT!
Unlike Facebook who actually takes complete ownership of all data you pump into their system, this supports XFN and RSS and politely links back to the original posts. It moves the status of a social network from data owning monopoly to data whoring aggregator, which IMO is far better.
So Google can now tie my email account to my blog posts, tweets and YouTube videos, nothing new there. They know who my friends are, nothing new there either. Where we once had privacy by obscurity we now have none, but we gain a rich social layer to the public Internet which was not there before and will continue growing not just at Google HQ but throughout the semantic web.
I'd be quite happy for my profile here to have an XFN link back to my blog, so I can share this, and other interesting topics like it with my contacts without purposely spamming them.
... I can't figure out what niche Buzz is trying to fill, exactly.
The best thing I can describe it as is a friends-only Twitter with an RSS reader for other social networking mashed into it; this immediately highlights it's major problem, which is that Twitter is so successful because it's open and searchable and browsable and hashtaggable and RTable and all that other chaff that makes up Twitter... which Buzz doesn't have. Okay, it's nice to have no character limit and the ability to do simple threading, but where's my searching for zeitgeist topics, where's my ... searching at all? This is Google, isn't that kind of their speciality? As it is you're just shouting out into a group of people you could reach via gchat, wave or even just plain old email already. All it's doing is speeding up cc:s.
It's also nice to be able to automatically get people's twitter feeds or blog posts from other sites automatically fed into it... this is still no more useful than an RSS feed, however, because you can't post back to those original sources. It's like saying to someone 'well, I'll listen to you shout across this field but when I want to reply you'll have to walk over to me'. The lack of multi-threading may be an issue if it ever gets high-volume posts going, because it means everyone's replies will just be in one blob rather than making more coherent ordered sense.
And of, course, any of my friends who care about micromessaging or status updates like this have a twitter anyway, so they don't care about it... Ultimately, about the only thing it's got going for it right now is the fact it's right there in your email window.
Forgive me if I am wrong, but surely the name of the thing that gets made public to all and sundry is PUBLIC PROFILE?
Surely the name is a bit of a giveaway?
I'm not sure Google have really done anything really bad here. All they have done is make your PUBLIC profile accessible via the Buzz system (have I got that wrong?) Surely the fact that this is a PUBLIC profile means that making it, er PUBLIC is to be expected?
Now, if they had made a PRIVATE profile PUBLIC that perhaps would be a problem.
... and cling to those archaic contraptions, *e-mail clients*, to read, y'know, E-MAILS, with an IMAP connection to Gmail!
I just logged in to www.Gmail (for the first time in weeks) to say "No, just get me to my Inbox" and turn off Buzz in the timid, self-effacing, nerd-in-front-of-a-girl-like link to "Turn Buzz off".
GER OFF MY LAWN!
Slapped together a PC using spare parts from dead PCs I had lying around. Loaded Ubuntu Server on this low-powered Frankenstein's monster, added Zimbra with SpamAssasin, got myself a domain name and voila - instant mail server, as many email accounts as I care, with a fairly decent web front-end as well as IMAP/POP3 for Thunderbird. Fairly cheaply too.
Used it remotely recently during my holiday in Cambodia/HK - created a throw-away mail account, with a password I wasn't going to use again and temporarily re-directed my mail to it. No fear of my email password being harvested at an e-cafe, just nuked the account when I got home (after transferring the mail over, of course).
I have always avoided all this sort of bullcrap and have checked Googles data on me -it is crap and useless - but by default -I might now be advertising myself to the unwashed masses out there looking to trouble me.
I have a dog and a crowbar and will learn how to use them and get some big tattoos;
(Maybe)
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