I am big fan of Google, and have always praised their push for open standards and innovation. I use many of their services. I would have gladly shared everything with them, but this is more than “sharing” my information. A simple solution would have been a standard opt-in.

Most users had the “Buzz” icon appear automatically, some people clicked on “Try Buzz”, and other clicked on “No Thanks”. Even if users clicked on “No Thanks”, Buzz was still active, but hidden.

Google fd up this time. This was more about #’s than innovation. I wrote a little more about my experience and thoughts about Google Buzz here: http://buzzkill.posterous.com

Keep up the great work.

By “mandatory,” I really meant to refer to what seems to be your vision of the information future (i.e., “where the puck is going”), a world with much broader tolerance or pressure for public-by-default/opt-out-if-ya-gotta-problem. But, yes, some people had no choice but to be enrolled in Buzz. It was not voluntary, although remaining a Buzz participant or Google user is mostly voluntary.

Flickr is tangential. Yes, some people want more privacy. So far as I know, however, Flickr has been public-by-default from the jump. So, there is no issue of breach of trust or sudden, unilateral publication of previously private material. Sure, people were closed out of Yahoo! Photos, but I don’t think they and their images were auto-enrolled in Flickr. Flickr would truly be analogous only if we were talking about someone new to Gmail/Talk/Reader who signed up today for Buzz, knowing what it was, and then complained that it’s not private.

The primary reason I continue to care about this is that I think the configuration of Buzz at launch reveals unpleasant truths about Google and either Google’s overall approach to privacy or Google’s overall compliance and validation systems and culture. If Google really thought that unilaterally making private data public was good and proper, then I think the company has no business in the e-mail/chat/telephony/data business. If only some Googlers thought this launch configuration was good and proper, and they were able to launch despite official policy, then Google does not have adequate privacy compliance systems and procedures in place—which I think is unacceptable for so large, mature, and ubiquitous a company.

The swift “fixes” to Buzz do nothing to remedy these deeper implications, which I think should occupy consumers, citizens, and regulators for a long, thoughtful time. Yes, I know that Google’s business model is ultimately orthogonal to privacy, but the company seemed to have struck a roughly acceptable balance and stuck with it… until now.

It’s possible that’s how it worked for you, but The first time I saw ANY mention of BUZZ on my gmail site was when I checked and saw it was enabled.

If I hadn’t read some of the rants from the ‘whiners’, it would probably STILL be enabled.

>>I’d suggest that there are/were very simple ways to address this concern like going to your settings and choosing to make your buzz contacts private.

It’s kind of hard to do that when Google never told me they were turning it ON.
Why is that so difficult to understand? We’re somehow have a dialog somewhere saying “We have a new service that lets you do X and unless you tell us not to, we’re going to share Y?”

You’ve said several times here “Joining Buzz is a choice. And even if someone were to join..”

If I had been GIVEN a choice, it wouldn’t be here ranting…
I think if MOST people here had been given a choice, you wouldn’t have had cause to write this post.

Sure, a user can quickly hide their contacts after the fact, but the truth is that once a breach has occurred you’re compromised no matter how quickly you respond. Some real-world examples of people affected here include:

Abusive spouses gaining contacts for new partners,
Underground human-rights protestor networks
Journalist sources such as whistle blowers

Again, I’m sure that these folk have tried to cover their tracks as much as possible, but why did Google think that exposing this PII would be cool without saying ‘ok here’s what I’m about to do’. (Which clearly wasn’t so hard to do, as they managed to roll out their updates pretty quickly once the wave of hate started).

Social networks are cool, and I’m sure Buzz will be worth following. But don’t confuse the valid criticisms of the breach in trust with general feedback on the service itself.

Some people have issues with privacy and the default public photos at flickr every bit as much as they do with Buzz. Do a search for “privacy” in the Flickr help forum and you get over 5,000 results. http://www.flickr.com/search/forum/?lang=en-us&q=privacy

Many people feel as private about their photos even on a photo sharing site as they do on Buzz. And remember, Yahoo closed Yahoo photos forcing people to choose to migrate out of those accounts. Many ended up in a more public Flickr.

And yet photos are still public by default on Flickr. For GOOD REASON. Most people could care less if people see their Flickr photos. Just like most people could care less if people see their Buzz contacts. Many want photos and contacts public (like me), but the vast majority of people are just plain ambivalent about it. It is a very small minority of people, like you, who seem offended by a public default setting.

The analogy between Buzz a *social networking site* (where you’d expect your contacts to be public) and Flickr, a social networking photo site is apropos.

I believe you missed the point of my comparison.

The people you e-mail — your contact list — is, as we have seen in spades over the last few days, considered by a very large number of people to be as private as the contents of the inbox itself. People have been shocked that this contact list was made public by default, and many people have come forward with examples of how this has damaged their privacy in a tangible way.

The point is that e-mail is inherently assumed to be a private service from soup-to-nuts — there is no reasonable expectation that anything associated with your account will suddenly become public domain. Because e-mail has a long-standing expectation of being a closed-system private service, if you want to do *anything* that changes that model you need to be excruciatingly clear about the consequences of what’s happening and you need to take extra pains to educate your user base about the new features before you take any action.

Google failed spectacularly in that regard with the Buzz rollout and freaked out a whole lot of people for very good reason.

Flickr, on the other hand, is a photo *sharing* service — a service that is designed to be accessed by others, and that is public out of the gate. Totally different expectation with a much lower burden for disclosure and hand-holding.

It’s been publicly available as the register of the thomashawk.com domain since I started blogging, since day 1. Seriously, anyone and everyone can easily see that. The fact that I’ve built a photography career as Thomas Hawk is not disingenuous at all.

Is Charlie Sheen disengenous for building his acting career as Charlie Sheen instead of Carlos Irwin Estévez?

In terms of your digital photos vs. email contacts, I think it’s a very appropriate comparison. Photos by nature include very personal, private information. Photos of your house, of your car, of your children, of your coworkers, these are as personal as who you email.

The point is that both Flickr and Buzz give you an opportunity to turn off the public default and recharacterize your photos or contact list as private. I see nothing wrong with that at all.

And Google is not displaying anyone’s private email at all. They are simply sharing who *you* choose to add as a buzz contact if you don’t elect to make it private. That’s quite a different thing than “all the information contained in your email box,” which is a disingenuous way to characterize the current privacy debate.