Google’s latest introduction, “Google Buzz” has come up with some critical flaws.
Google Buzz is a social networking and messaging tool by Google, designed to integrate into the company’s web-based email program, Gmail. Buzz allows integration of photos, videos, and links as part of the “conversations” aspects of Gmail like conversation threading.
Google introduced Buzz to compete with social networking websites like Facebook and microblogging services like Twitter, but its users have shown great concern about intrusions of privacy. Still, the launch was widely seen as a challenge to Facebook.
Buzz was launched on 9 February this year. It was automatically integrated with Gmail and allows users to post status updates, share content and read and comment on friends’ posts.
One problem that immediately caused concern was that this application automatically gives users a ready-made circle of friends based on the people they most frequently e-mailed.
Unless users changed settings in their profile, this list could automatically be made public, allowing anyone to see who a user corresponded with most frequently.
Buzz was only tested internally and bypassed more extensive trials with external testers – used for many other Google services. Most of the Google’s new services are tested by the Google Trusted Tester program, a network of friends and family of Google employees who are given confidential access to products before they launch. Buzz was not tested by this program, thence caused concerns.
Evgeny Morozov, a Belarus-born researcher and blogger who looks at the political implications of the internet, also raised concerns.
“If I was working for the Iranian or the Chinese government, I would immediately dispatch my internet geek squads to check on Google Buzz accounts for political activists and see if they have any connections that were previously unknown to the government,” he wrote [quoted from BBC.com].
Along with rectifying this privacy issue, Google wants to include a better “preferences menu” to allow users to better tailor what appears in their inbox, and a more prominent “mute” option to switch the service off. Google also wants to give people who don’t use Gmail the ability to use Buzz.
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