I don't have a Google Profile, I said no thanks when Gmail asked me if I wanted to try Buzz, and I clicked "turn off buzz" at the bottom of gmail. Can anyone tell me if people can follow me in Buzz? Or if I'm following anybody?
I have been clicking around in Google and I have no idea how to control this and I don't want to turn Buzz on by accident...
Rant:
The terrible thing is, I didn't give Buzz another thought until all this negative publicity turned up. Now I'm sitting here very paranoid that Google is misusing information about me. And I'm wasting a lot of time trying to figure out what it is or isn't doing. I resent having this fear and I am annoyed that my lack of confidence that "No Means No" leads to wasting time on Google.
You can definitely add me to the list of people who believe Google is the new Microsoft. They have hired some of this generations' best and brightest for what? To find new ways to spray ad feces on the Internet, to kowtow to oppressive regimes up to the moment when they realized they were being back stabbed, and to treat privacy as a quaint and archaic notion.
Worst of all, from the perspective of the HN community, they seem to be acting like the Microsoft of old: Instead of indexing information, they want to own it themselves, which is why they roll out services like Buzz directly competing with Twitter, Foursquare, Friendfeed, Facebook, and so on.
It's a sad day for Google when I start to sympathize with Rupert Murdoch. But now I understand why he wasn't rushing to embrace how Google would add value to his news businesses.
Using another gmail account, I tried to discover what is being exposed via Buzz about my primary gmail account. Other than have one follow the other, I couldn't see anything that wasn't already exposed through my Google Profile. I don't use Google Reader for anything besides RSS, and even so, I don't refer to it any more (I use FriendFeed for RSS).
There must be particular kinds or sets of data that are exposed by Buzz, and I must not have contributed anything to those corpi. Some particular things that don't seem to have been made public via Buzz: my gmail contact list; any of my email, sent or received; Google Groups postings; any Google Chat conversations; nothing about or from my Google Wave account; Google Reader subscribed feeds.
Well, yes, but it's also meaningless: if you're not using buzz, there's nothing to follow. It's like they added you to a chat contacts list, when you never sign in to chat.
Oh wait, that's exactly what it is like, because they did the exact same thing with the launch of GChat: pre-populated social graph. No outrage then about people being able to listen to the sound of silence.
I set up a fake account for testing and tried to search for myself using my various email addresses. They don't seem to exist. So right now I think that setting up a Profile is the key. Once you set that up, Buzz can start sharing your information and you would have to fool around with privacy settings to shut that down.
I hope I'm mistaken about this, it would seriously suck http://rot13.com/index.php?text=fhpx%20tbng%20qvpx if your profile is the key to broadcasting news about you to everyone in your (automatically generated) address book including who is frequently mailed or mailing you.
I turned on buzz for one of my Gmail accounts, for which I had already set up a profile. I then saw I had one person following me. Someone I know.
But I did not see any indication that any of my contacts were auto-following me, or me them.
On another Gmail account, for which I have no profile, I signed in and was greeted with the Try out buzz? splash thing. I clicked "No thanks."
I get to my mail page, and there's the buzz icon right under Inbox. That's a real WTF moment. I clicked the Buzz icon, and it appears no different than on my other account (except here I was not following anyone, and no one was following me). So, I have no idea what that initial splash page was for.
However, back in my main Gmail account, I used Buzz to search for that other account. Not found. But I have no idea what that really means. Is it not found because there is no profile? Not found because I didn't really opt in?
I don't have a Google Profile, I said no thanks when Gmail asked me if I wanted to try Buzz, and I clicked "turn off buzz" at the bottom of gmail. Can anyone tell me if people can follow me in Buzz? Or if I'm following anybody?
I have been clicking around in Google and I have no idea how to control this and I don't want to turn Buzz on by accident...
Rant:
The terrible thing is, I didn't give Buzz another thought until all this negative publicity turned up. Now I'm sitting here very paranoid that Google is misusing information about me. And I'm wasting a lot of time trying to figure out what it is or isn't doing. I resent having this fear and I am annoyed that my lack of confidence that "No Means No" leads to wasting time on Google.
You can definitely add me to the list of people who believe Google is the new Microsoft. They have hired some of this generations' best and brightest for what? To find new ways to spray ad feces on the Internet, to kowtow to oppressive regimes up to the moment when they realized they were being back stabbed, and to treat privacy as a quaint and archaic notion.
Worst of all, from the perspective of the HN community, they seem to be acting like the Microsoft of old: Instead of indexing information, they want to own it themselves, which is why they roll out services like Buzz directly competing with Twitter, Foursquare, Friendfeed, Facebook, and so on.
It's a sad day for Google when I start to sympathize with Rupert Murdoch. But now I understand why he wasn't rushing to embrace how Google would add value to his news businesses.