Google has faced a storm of criticism since launching its networking service Buzz last week.
There has been much media hype about the privacy flaws in Buzz, including the fact that any user of Gmail joined Buzz automatically without being asked first whether they wanted to opt in, and were then linked to people that they emailed most frequently.
Criticisms of the service have included women claiming that abusive ex-husbands could now follow their every move online, and a US privacy watchdog group has lodged a complaint with US regulators because it says Buzz breaks consumer protection laws.
Part of the controversy was fuelled by misunderstanding, but Google has made some rapid changes to Buzz nevertheless.
Google says that it implemented the auto-follow feature on Buzz because it thought that people wouldn’t want to start their social network right from scratch. However, people were alarmed when they logged on and saw that they were automatically set up to follow people. Users then wrongly assumed that a list of people they were following was already displayed for the world to see before they had even set up a profile.
There were further complaints from users that the checkbox to tick for not displaying information about following publicly was too difficult to locate, and so Google made the option more prominent for users.
Google then proceeded to change its auto follow model to an auto suggest one, which meant that where before you would be automatically set up to follow your most-emailed and chatted to contacts, you now won’t be automatically set up to follow anyone. There are now suggestions on who to follow, who you won’t be following until you’ve reviewed the list and selected the option ‘follow selected people and start using Buzz’.
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