Fuck Google Buzz

[badstar]

I've made my views on things like this clear before- I hate Twitter. I mean really, truly loathe it beyond my ability to explain. Things like this are contributing to the crumbling of language, people's attention spans, privacy and social interaction. (and, as Gavin says, it goes against countless centuries of wisdom that tell us that your every single, solitary mere thought do not need to be given voice- and no one should have to be subjected to them.)

But Twitter at least has one thing going for it- it didn't sign me up by a default setting of its mere existence.

Google Buzz, on the other hand, did. I've turned it off.

When Google chat was introduced, it wasn't forced on me- I was asked if I wanted to enable it. When Google Wave came out a few months back, it asked if I wanted to try it- I never did, and it never tried to force me either (whatever happened to Google Wave, by the way? Never took off I guess?)

But I logged in the other day, saw something about Google Buzz and noticed that lo, it was enabled by default on my email account. I checked the settings and couldn't find any immediately noticeable way yo turn it off. So I went poking around a bit and found this blog post:

http://www.accmanpro.com/2010/02/11/google-buzz-off/

This post informs us:

However, it didn’t take me more than 20 minutes of having Buzz plugged into my email to realize: I DON’T WANT THIS SHIT. I may not be alone. Despite the claim to help me: ‘to start conversations about the things you find interesting,’ it does nothing of the sort. Instead, it adds in any ’stuff’ that people it has decided I am following put into their Buzz (a bit like Twitter) along with any other accounts that Google has linked via their profiles such as Flickr, Twitter, Google Reader, assorted blogs….the list goes on. In other words it is aggregating a pile of stuff and lobbing it over the wall into my GMail.

Additionally linked from that post was this:

http://www.businessinsider.com/warning-google-buzz-has-a-huge-privacy-flaw-2010-2

Which informs us that...

The problem is that -- by default -- the people you follow and the people that follow you are made public to anyone who looks at your profile.

In other words, before you change any settings in Google Buzz, someone could go into your profile and see the people you email and chat with most.

A Google spokesperson asked us to phrase this claim differently. Like this: "In other words, after you create your profile in Buzz, if you don't edit any of the default settings, someone could visit your profile and see the people you email and chat with most (provided you didn't edit this list during profile creation)."

And there's the part that, if you choose to use Buzz, informs us that they don't let you know that this information is all made public by default:

If a user notices the box, it might help users "catch" that they might be following people they don't want the world to know they're following. But you don't have to close the box to use Buzz. Closing the box does not trigger a warning or anything else that alerts the user they've agreed to publish a list of the people they email and chat with most.

(It all makes more sense if you read the rest of the post- I'm not copying the entire thing here. There are pictures to show you what they're talking about too.)

They also point out:

The good news for Google is that this is a very easy problem to fix. Google must either shut off auto-following, or it must make follower lists private by default as soon as possible.

But at least for now, it seems that Google doesn't agree with that.

If you want to know how to change your settings for privacy and whatnot, both posts include instructions on how to change them.

If you just want to turn off the fucking thing, log into gmail, scroll down to the very bottom of the screen where the tiny print is and you should see a link that says "turn off Buzz"- it's right next to "turn off chat".

you may need a magnifying glass and a tour guide...but it's there. *sigh*

Every day, I loathe technology a little more. Technology is supposed to make your life better, not more vapid, empty and lacking of any substance whatsoever.

You're not gonna convince me that this will in any way better my life. I see shit like this and I think more and more that the Amish have the right idea.

Comments

[erl-queen.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm so with you on that last part. Today, after my work computer was carted off to be fixed of a huge destructive virus that had somehow infiltrated, I wondered if it wouldn't just be better to go back to typewriters. I said this to my boss (who doesn't use a computer at all) who laughed and said "well sometimes typewriters jammed" to which I replied "but when they did, you didn't lose years worth of files". Uh-huh.

This all goes double for supposed social networking. All it's done is made people even less connected to each other. Good job, technology. Or rather, good job, stupid humans who don't know how to use technology, because it's not all bad and has some really brilliant uses. But one of them should not be to make sure that every person you ever met in your life is constantly informed of your smallest thought or movement, and vice versa.

And it's like crack - people who are users are constantly turning into pushers. I've had a couple people trying to convince me to use Facebook just in the past week or so, no matter how I protest. No, I have no interest. I don't want to know what my high school friends are up to now, and if I did, I'd contact them in a more meaningful way. Even with people I actually care about, I don't want to know every detail of their daily existence. It doesn't make me feel any closer to them.

Nor do I feel like sharing everything I do... hell, I even turned on the privacy settings on Youtube when I found out that it was sharing the videos I watched with Sannion, who I had "friended" there. I love him, but I like my privacy too.

I really wonder what this world is going to be like in 10 more years.

[chironcentaur.livejournal.com]

I was watching something on TV from about '94 and was reminded when "internet addiction" (you know, being online all fucking day long, never doing anything else, having no real world social life) actually used to be considered a problem. Now its the fucking way of life, and we keep making stuff to ascertain that you never have to be offline, no matter where you are and if you're not interested then you're the one with the problem. Just frightening, we are so doomed.

I'm not entirely knocking social networking, hell I have a girlfriend because of it, and if all I was exposed to still were the worthless shitheads I grew up with I might have killed myself by now. But still, leave it to people to push things way too far. Not that I consider Twitter social networking, that's just useless stupidity for equally useless vapid, self absorbed twits that think their every bowel movement is so interesting it simply must be broadcast to the world. :-P

My father has been trying to get me on Facebook. Two years ago he was so anti-internet he grumbled about people sending him emails. Now he's all into Facebook. Yeah, no interest in "social networking" that is little more than Twitter and a big blinky profile page. That's not how I make friends, not on the internet and not in real life either.

[erl-queen.livejournal.com]

I think it comes down to content and quality. Twitter and Facebook are all about racking up supposed "friends" or "followers" or whatever, regardless of if you have any real connection to them, or anything meaningful to say. Whereas I'm still on Livejournal because it's mostly content-based, actual thoughts and stuff. And I have no problem with topic-specific groups like religious e-lists because they bring together people who share genuine important things in common but would not otherwise know each other (which is, of course, also how Sannion and I met). Hell, even totally meaningless hobby forums are a huge difference from Twitter, to me.

[erl-queen.livejournal.com]

That's not how I make friends, not on the internet and not in real life either.

I think this is a major factor in why I find it all so unappealing. I have no interest in interacting with people with whom I have nothing in common, and I don't have much in common with most people - this goes for online and real world. Whereas, from my observations, it seems that 'normal' people are able to bond over the most trivial stuff (Oh you like pancakes? So do I!), and therefore may feel more of a connection to random strangers than I ever could.

Even taking that into consideration, though, it doesn't seem like these things are strengthening the real bonds of friendship for even 'normal' people, so I question their usefulness.

[chironcentaur.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of people mistake casual acquaintances for real friends, and the social networking sites are only working to further erode that word away. It could also be that other people find more meaning in casual acquaintances than you or I do; I don't mind the ones I have, but the hell if I'm going to go out of my way to make them.

Twitter and Facebook is all basically surface shit, small talk on the internet. I don't have a lot of interest in or patience for that in real life. If all I know about you is what you ate for breakfast, what you thought of that movie (and if you're a big enough piece of shit to pull your phone out in the theater to send these updates) and that you hate your job, I don't know you any better than I do the strangers at the bus stop that want to chat with me. Those people I just happen to run into merely because I exist in the world, why would I go out of my way to find it online?

Livejournal demands some sort of content, so a better chance of it attracting people with something to say. And yeah the hobby type forums are different, because there is actual discussion of something meaningful (to the people who attend them) going on. Its not small talk people make to fill in the silence.

[leiacat.livejournal.com]

And people wonder why as much as I appreciate some of the things that Google does (like maps and search-line unit conversion), I absolutely refuse to get involved with anything which requires me to allow Google to save a cookie.

[sleepingwolf.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the quick and easy summary of where the "off" switch is -- as someone who finds himself emailing boatloads of people due to various volunteer positions, I don't want them linked to my profile.

I'm a little more positive on social networking than you are, but simultaneously fear the way in which it makes busy-work appear to be real work.

[sleepingwolf.livejournal.com]

Argh, did it but it looks like I still have followers on my Google Profile (created to direct people to the right info about me online).

Edited to add: Fortunately, the last article you linked covers that, too.

[neowiccan.livejournal.com]

EEEEEEEeeeeEEEEeeeeeEEEEEE!!!!
thanks so much for letting me know about this!
khairete
suz