Google admits Buzz privacy fail

Feb 17, 2010 by Dan Taylor    4 Comments    Posted under: News, Social Media, Technology

Google officially admitted yesterday that it’s testing procedure surrounding their new offering Buzz was less than sufficient. Since it’s February 9th appearance, Google has had to do some serious retooling of the product, amid privacy concerns that sprang up almost immediately. Google says that they’re working “extremely hard” to fix the problem. “We’re very early in this space. This was one of our first big attempts,” Todd Jackson, Buzz product manager, told BBC News.

But how could one of the world’s largest online service providers overlook such a detail? It comes down to a simple lack of widespread testing. Buzz was only tested internally at Google, something the company normally does NOT do. Most often, when Google wants to bring a new product to market, they’ll tap into their unofficial “Google Trusted Tester” program, a network of family and friends of Google employees who have proven track records and are trusted with a high degree of confidentiality. These “Trusted Testers” are in exchange, given early access to a soon to be launched Google product. Unfortunately, Buzz did not receive the same treatment. “We’ve been testing Buzz internally at Google for a while. Of course, getting feedback from 20,000 Googlers isn’t quite the same as letting Gmail users play with Buzz in the wild,” comments Jackson.

To battle the negative buzz now surrounding Buzz, Google has set up a “war room” at their Mountain View, CA. headquarters that is strictly devoted to sorting out the Buzz issues.

“If it becomes clear that people don’t think we’ve done enough, we’ll make more changes,” said Jackson.

He acknowledged that many of the networks “tens of millions” of users were “rightfully upset” and that the firm was “very, very sorry”.

“We know we need to improve things.”

The Changes

Only three days after launch, Google team members called a meeting to make the quick fixes. With obvious holes open in the “who do they communicate with the most?” format, Google pulled the plug on the “friend” matching process, and is now only suggesting friends that the Buzz user may be interested in following back (how they determine this, like all things Google, remains a mystery). They’ve also announced that they’re implementing a feature that should make it easier for Buzz users to shut the service off entirely. Jackson says that “transparency and control” are “top priorities” and that users will “continue to see improvements”. And while it seems “transparency” is top priority on paper at Google, that isn’t always the case in the physical world.

Additional changes that Buzz users can look forward to include a better preferences menu that should allow users more control over what’s arriving in their inbox, as well as a more prominent “Mute” button that would switch the service off altogether. Further illustrating the flub at Google, Jackson adds that the idea has been discussed to make Buzz a service independent from Gmail.

“We think that integration with Gmail was absolutely the right way to go – we wanted to make Buzz easily accessible to people,” Jackson said.

“We also want to give people who don’t use Gmail the ability to use Buzz, so we’re exploring the idea of offering a separate destination site.”

Google reps expect the changes to Buzz to go live sometime this week.

It looks like Google has heard what the audience has said, and is making the appropriate changes. However, with the recent ‘what is this? I don’t get it.’ crash-n-burn surrounding Wave, coupled with the Buzz ‘wanna know who I talk to most?’ blowup, Google’s going to have to pull some magic out of the proverbial hat to get me excited about a new product launch.