Anger Leads to Apology From Google About Buzz | Hacker News Reader

Anger Leads to Apology From Google About Buzz

nytimes.com

18 pointscwan17 comments

sigh Google, please test this stuff out with non-Googlers first. We understand that you haven't learned yet about how social media works, after several tries...but we like your ideas anyway. Just let the unwashed masses sanity check your stuff first before you roll it out to everybody and their mom.

"Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely".

This Buzz stunt should haunt Google forever as we clearly can't trust them on "do no evil". This is a at least the sentiment I still have from this Buzz privacy scandal.

The unofficial Google motto is "Don't be evil", not "Do no evil". It's a subtle, yet important, difference.

The other subtle, yet important, difference is that its an unofficial motto. Everyone assumes its Googles official stance on everything, yet they never said that[1], so really, they can be as evil as they want without going against anything they've ever stated. Quite clever of them, really, to make everyone assume that this is their official motto, when they can later turn around and say,w ith a straight face, no, we never claimed that.

[1] Please correct me if I'm wrong. I searched but found no evidence saying otherwise. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil doesn't really say that its their motto either, but does certainly suggest that Google has been riding the Don't be Evil publicity.

Think about it. What would be the hypothetical benefit? Being able to say "Hi, yes, we're being evil, but it's OK because we never officially promised otherwise"? Do you think such a statement heralds a clear PR win for any company?

Disclaimer: I work at Google. My opinions are my own.

Of course I don't think they'll do that, but if they've already messed up PR for some reason, due to being evil, at least they can brush it off (at least a little) on having never claimed that they weren't going to be evil. If it comes to that, they're probably already screwed, but at least they have a counter argument against the you promised you wouldn't be evil crowd.

Buchheit, the creator of Gmail, said he "wanted something that, once you put it in there, would be hard to take out," adding that the slogan was "also a bit of a jab at a lot of the other companies, especially our competitors, who at the time, in our opinion, were kind of exploiting the users to some extent."

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dont_be_evil

Exploiting users privacy in order to build a social network is evil - - and saying "I'm sorry" and fixing the issue when you have exploited millions of users does not make Google's Buzz act less evil.

An analogy could be to spam millions of people to build a social network - - and then you say "I'm sorry, we won't spam any longer, see we fixed it". Is this acceptable? I say no. They should be accountable for their actions and be punished like spammers get punished.

Listen, when they rolled out Buzz, it showed a giant splash screen and asked if you want to try it or not. I have a screenshot of this screen. There were two links at the bottom that either allowed you to try it out, or to not use it and go to GMail.

If individuals are hung up about privacy, they don't have to join. If they do join, I have a whole set of screenshots I took before the revamp on Thursday showing all the ways they could configure Buzz before it was activated.

If users actually bothered to read, Google's plan would have worked well. Unfortunately, people who say they're hung up on privacy can't be bothered to read how to protect it when they join a new social network, yet, have plenty of time to blog about it to complain afterwards. Irony, that.

Hanlon's razor

So they're sorry for the "concern", but not the action? Can they really not understand what was the problem with what they did?

It does look as if they've addressed several major concerns, but they're still bulling on ahead. And it's kind of ballsy after all of that to say that "tens of millions of people had tried the service in its first 48 hours" when "trying the service" appears to have been an unavoidable consequence of checking one's gmail, at least during that window of time.

-nod- sorry for the concern caused is a huge distance from "we are sorry that we chose viral over virtuous". I can't believe that GOOG top level management (who must be using Gmail as dogfooding), would have been comfortable with their top contacts being shared. Would have made for interesting viewing in light of possible deals and aquisitions..

Yeah, how about all GOOG employees release exactly the same information on themselves that they released on others without their permission. That'll show they are sorry.

>> how about all GOOG employees release exactly the same information on themselves that they released on others without their permission.

If they use Gmail, didn't they?

I dunno, maybe they all opted out during the dogfooding.

It was not unavoidable. On every account I saw Buzz activated on (4) on Wednesday last week, users were given an option to try out Buzz or not.

Google engineers need to understand that in the Real World, Frequent Past E-mails do not relate to "Most Likely to Follow". It seems like this was more of a purely technology centric solution to a human interaction identification problem without taking the "human" part into consideration. Truly scary stuff...

Maybe I'm an unusual case, but their picks were pretty good for me. Out of my few hundred contacts, it correctly chose a good top 10 that I would want to follow. Maybe my chat history helped out on that. That being said, they screwed up with the auto-subscribe instead of auto-suggest.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com