Google works to clean up Buzz privacy mess after launch

Mere days after the high-profile launch of Google’s social media service Buzz, the company has made modifications to its functionality in hopes of appeasing privacy critics. Over the weekend, Google apologized on its blog for causing some of the initial concerns over Buzz and vowed to continue making improvements based on user feedback. The most significant of those are already in place, though the move highlights Google’s somewhat arrogant assumptions about what its users would be willing to share with the world right out of the gate.

Gmail and Google Buzz product manager Todd Jackson first wrote that in just two days after Buzz’s launch, the service had facilitated more than 9 million posts and comments, including more than 200 posts per minute from mobile devices. Despite this, there have been numerous “suggestions” made to Google (as we have learned, some more civil than others) on how to improve privacy on Buzz and—more importantly—user control of it.

No longer does Buzz automatically follow a handful of your most frequent contacts—instead, it suggests to you people you might want to follow, letting the user make the decision instead of Google. This came after heavy criticism sparked by a woman whose secret Google account was auto-followed by her abusive ex-husband who did not previously know how to find her (she wrote a widely-linked blog post on the topic last week, but it has since been hidden from the public). Even people like myself, who maintain an intentionally public presence, were taken by surprise by the auto-follow feature at Buzz’s launch—auto-suggest will be much more accepted among the social media user base.

Google also said that it no longer automatically connects users’ public Picasa Web Albums and Google Reader shared items to their Buzz accounts. (The justification for doing this initially was that the information was already public, so Google naturally assumed that you would want to blast that information everywhere at all times.) Now, the user gets to decide whether he or she automatically buzzes things shared on those services.

Beyond this, Google has previously added a feature that allows users to block specific users whether or not they have a public profile—a feature whose absence was quite baffling at launch. Google has also highlighted a setting that allows users to keep their follow list (or their own followers) private. This was a criticism that was also prevalent when Facebook rolled out its latest privacy changes—who you know is valuable information to all kinds of people (marketers, stalkers, terrorists) and not everyone wants to share who they’ve made connections with online. Google has also added “more clarity” on which followers/people you follow will appear on your public profile and when.

“We’re very sorry for the concern we’ve caused and have been working hard ever since to improve things based on your feedback. We’ll continue to do so,” Jackson wrote in the company’s most recent blog post.

These swift and widespread changes to Buzz’s automatic-everything behaviors are certainly commendable, and it’s clear that Google does listen to user feedback in ways that other companies don’t. However, the sheer extent to which the company had to back off from its initial launch functionality goes to show how delusional Google was when it came to its assumptions about user privacy.

Just because I share something somewhere else on the Internet doesn’t mean I want it auto-linked to something else I use, and just because I choose to use Gmail doesn’t mean I even necessarily want to be involved in Buzz at all. Those should be choices that are left up to the user, not Google on behalf of the user. End result: Google is left cleaning up its messes when it could be moving forward.