Just days after launching it, Google has announced it is tweaking Google Buzz to address serious and legitimate privacy concerns. That's positive but the worrying part is the way Google launched the product without thinking things through. It might say something about a company that is so fixated on its technology that it's forgotten basic people skills.
As the New York Times explained last week, the problem with Google Buzz is that it turned your email contacts into followers for all the world to see, regardless of whether you wanted it or not. When you think about it, that's alarming. People send emails to all sorts of folks, including whistleblowers, anti-government and corporate activists and illicit lovers. That can become messy and, in some cases, downright dangerous.
To its credit, Google has moved quickly to fix the problem. The biggest change is that Google is dumping the auto-following system. Now you can de-select people. Sounds easy? But you still have to put in the effort.
The alarming part is what this says about Google. As John Naughton writes in The Observer , it tells us that Google might be turning into Microsoft. Think back to 1995 when Bill Gates leveraged his dominance in one market to wipe out Netscape by integrating the second-rate Internet Explorer into the Windows operating system, thereby making it the default browser for most computer users. Google is using a similar strategy to destroy Facebook and Twitter.
"It's breathtakingly crass and intrusive and takes astonishing liberties with your privacy, of which more in a moment,'' Naughton writes. "In earlier times, Google would have developed Buzz as a "beta" product and offered it as an option on the top of the Gmail menu for those who wished to try it, as they do with the calendar, docs, reader and other services. But with Buzz they simply inserted it into Gmail with only the most enigmatic of warnings, and suddenly users find that, somehow, they've been enrolled in Google's own Twitter/Facebook competitor."
David Coursey in PC World is even more blunt. He says the episode shows Google's complete lack of people skills which "makes the company look technically sophisticated but socially inept."
"Google's millionaire genius-nerds need to learn what real people expect from technology and how to deliver it,'' Coursey writes. "Given the option, Google's choice for default settings were what benefited Google the most, not what best protected its consumers. This is what happens when a company is too engineering driven and strives to make only fact-based decisions … Goggle missed the fact that making automatically-generated contacts visible to the entire world—by default—might creep some people out and even endanger the safety of others. That's not something they teach in engineering school."
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