Google Buzz, Privacy, and You

An uproar was recently started in reference to some privacy concerns about the new release from Google, Google Buzz. One of the first to sound the alarm was a blogger who was quite explicit about disliking some of its default options (and by explicit I mean “NSFW language” explicit, the post is here) which prompted some quick changes from Google.  In order to start using Buzz, you have to create/modify your Google public profile which will appear next to all of your activity in the Buzz feed.  By default, the public profile would display all those you follow. Chances are you’ve followed everyone in your contact list, so you just made your whole contact list public.  Now in the new behavior:

A box titled “How do you want to appear to others” will now include a check-box that says “Show the list of people I’m following and the list of people following me on my public profile.” To hide your followers, click the box, or click the “View and edit the people you follow” to customize your account.

The interesting thing here to me is that Buzz is essentially a service like Facebook or Twitter, designed to let other folks know what you are up to.  The fact that there is a privacy uproar around it is somewhat amusing, because it is designed to provide the opposite of privacy – to provide your followers information about what you are doing.  If you don’t want to share this information, don’t use Google Buzz!

I’ll enlist a famous quote from Scott McNealy, then CEO of Sun Microsystems: “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”

It is amusing to me what people – especially young people – are willing to post online.  As a child, my parents once told me that once you say something you can’t take it back.  In today’s Internet-connected age, this holds true and is even more significant: once you say something online, hundreds if not thousands of people will see it instantly, and potentially billions of people will be able to track it down in archives, Google searches, the wayback machine, or in countless other ways.  Be careful what you share online.  Be careful what you say.  It might–probably will–come back to haunt you.