Many users bristled at what they considered an invasion of privacy, and they faulted the company for failing to ask permission before sharing a person’s Buzz contacts with a broad audience. For the last three days, Google [...]]]> The New York Times has published an article documenting the criticism that Google Buzz has received from privacy advocates:

Many users bristled at what they considered an invasion of privacy, and they faulted the company for failing to ask permission before sharing a person’s Buzz contacts with a broad audience. For the last three days, Google has faced a firestorm of criticism on blogs and Web sites, and it has already been forced to alter some features of the service.

E-mail, it turns out, can hold many secrets, from the names of personal physicians and illicit lovers to the identities of whistle-blowers and antigovernment activists. And Google, so recently a hero to many people for threatening to leave China after hacking attempts against the Gmail accounts of human rights activists, now finds itself being pilloried as a clumsy violator of privacy…

“People thought what they had was an address book for an e-mail program, and Google decided to turn that into a friends list for a new social network,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group in Washington. “E-mail is one of the few things that people understand to be private.”

Mr. Rotenberg said that his organization planned to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission claiming that the Google’s use of e-mail conversations to build a social network was unfair and deceptive.

So much for not doing any evil.  That may be a harsh judgment, considering that anyone can make mistakes.  However, if the roll-out of Buzz and the fact that it makes your most common e-mail contacts public by default was an honest mistake by honest people, Google could do a better job of owning up to its mistakes.

[W]ithout you ever touching Google Buzz’s privacy settings, the entire world may know who you correspond with.

…I am extremely concerned about hundreds of activists in authoritarian countries who would never want to reveal a list of their interlocutors to [...]]]> I wish people were more skeptical of new Internet-based social technologies.  This article makes several good points:

[W]ithout you ever touching Google Buzz’s privacy settings, the entire world may know who you correspond with.

…I am extremely concerned about hundreds of activists in authoritarian countries who would never want to reveal a list of their interlocutors to the outside world.

It’s business decisions like this that make me very suspicious of Google’s highfalutin rhetoric about their commitment to defending the freedom of expression. … the ethics of such business decisions is extremely shoddy, to say the least. If Google executives are really committed to defending the freedom of expression, then they must be inhabiting a dreamworld, where freedom of expression somehow always survives despite horrendous attacks on privacy.

As far as I can tell, Google is being either naive, negligent, or incompetent.