Google Buzz, Social Norms and Privacy

Another day, another privacy backlash — this time with Google Buzz. What’s new? Lots, as it turns out.

There are many minor ways in which Google Buzz fails, both with regard to privacy and otherwise. For example, I’ve been posting my Buzz updates publicly because the user interface for posting it to a restricted group is horribly clunky. (Post only to my followers? What’s the point of that, when anyone can start following me?! Make it easy to post to a group that I have control over!)

But the major privacy SNAFU, as you’ve probably heard, is auto-follow. Google automatically makes public a list of the top 25 or so people you’ve corresponded with in Gmail or Google talk. Worse, the button to turn this “feature” off resides in your Google-wide profile, making it unnecessarily hard to find because it isn’t within the Buzz interface itself.

This is a classic example of what happens when the user interface is created by programmers instead of designers, a recurring problem for Google. Programmers partition features in a way that fits the computer’s natural data model, rather than the user’s natural mental model.

But getting back to privacy, it is a certainty in a statistical sense that Google outed a few affairs and other secret relationships. For even if you were yourself savvy enough to turn off the public display of your top correspondents, there’s a good chance the other party wasn’t, and might not have turned it off on their end.

When I enabled Buzz and realized what had happened, something changed for me in my head. I’d always regarded email and chat as a private medium. But that’s not true any more; Google forced me to discard my earlier expectations. Even if Google apologizes and retracts auto-follow (not that I think that’s likely), the way I view email has permanently changed, because I can’t be sure that it won’t happen again. I lost some of the privacy expectation that I had of not only Google’s services, but of email and chat in general, albeit to a lesser extent.

What I’ve tried to do in the preceding paragraphs is show in a step-by-step manner how Google’s move changed social norms. The larger players like Google and Microsoft have been very conservative when it comes to privacy, unlike upstarts like Facebook. So why did Google enable auto-follow? By all accounts, their hand was forced: they needed a social network to compete with Facebook and Twitter. Given the head-start that their competitors have, the only real way to compete was to drag their users into participating.

Google ended up changing society’s norms in a detrimental way in order to meet their business objectives. This has become a recurring theme (c.f. the section on Facebook in that article). I don’t think there is any possibility of putting the genie back in the bottle; this trend will only continue. This time it was about who I email; soon my expectations about the contents of emails themselves will probably change.

I believe that in the long run, the only “stable equilibrium” of privacy norms, as it were, would be for everyone to simply assume that everything they type into a computer will be publicly visible either instantly or at some point in the future, outside their control. That is not necessarily as terrible as it may seem. Nonetheless, society will take a long time to get there. Until then, the best we can do is push back against intrusions as much as possible, delaying the inevitable, giving ourselves enough time to adapt.

Do your part to fight back against auto-follow. Let Google know how you feel. Blog about it or leave a comment.

Updates

1. A New York Times blogger picked up the controversy.
2. Joe Bonneau has an analysis of users’ confused reactions.
3. Google has announced that it is rolling out some user-interface changes in response to the feedback. That is better than before, but the default is still public auto-follow.
4. The horror stories due to auto-follow have begun.
5. I have a new article with advice on privacy-conscious design.
6. Google decided to nix auto-follow after all! Awesome.

Thanks to Joe Bonneau for reviewing a draft of this article.

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