Get the hell off Google Buzz as absolutely soon as possible.

[reddragdiva]

• London bus maps as a plain web page. Way cool. (courtesy pir)

Google Buzz is completely fucked-up and broken shit. It's utterly superfluous ("That is the biggest problem with Buzz — it was invented not for us but for Google"), it comes with default huge privacy flaws for anyone using it, to the point of causing personal physical danger to Gmail users who haven't even switched it on.

I live in my Gmail — I remain a happy user for six years — and I can see why they put it there. But that this is deeply, deeply fucked up stupidity (hey, it worked inside a corporation for the engineers, let's release it as-is into the real world!) rather than culpable negligence (à la Facebook: privacy gets in the way of ads). But that's arguably worse, as it means less chance of stopping the next blithering fuckup on this scale. Google has a blog post up that singularly fails to address the seriousness of the problems or the blithering stupidity in causing them in the first place. If that's really the best they can do for a response, then Google has gone really, really fucking dumb way too quickly.

Switch it off and keep it off. If you have a Google profile (e.g. if you've ever used Google Reader), you'll need to clean that out too, even if you never switched Buzz on.

(Anyone who answers "But Facebook is bad too!" is an idiot with the logical thinking powers of a climate change creationist.)

Finally got the new Solaris box set up sensibly. Mirrored ZFS everywhere, two zones (which install much more smoothly if you haven't trashed your package database). Now setting up CruiseControl to duplicate our previous setup. The fun thing about working for a living is BIG toys to play with. And the coke, hookers and dumptrucks full of money, of course.* [*money, coke and hookers may settle in transit]

I've worked from home yesterday and today. Just because I can.

I've been reading LiveJournal for the first time in about eighteen months. Good Lord.

Anything on this weekend?

Update: I realise geeks are arrogant and contrary by nature, but the victim-blaming going on here is disgusting. Look at yourselves.

It's up to those of us who understand this stuff to help those that don't, not shit on them for not being us.

Update 2: More #buzzfail:

• Your location down to the address being posted automatically.
• It opts you in even if you say no. I thought that sorta shit went out with RealPlayer.
• A journalist claims grabs photos off her Android phone that she'd never uploaded. (arkady: "Right, that's it, I was going to get an Android, but now I'm getting an iPhone!")

(Comments on DreamWidth; comments on LiveJournal.)

Comments

re: Anything on this weekend?

[(Anonymous)]

Ghoul Garden is happening in Nottingham tomorrow on the 13th at The Maze. Very good night with fantastic old school goth/deathrock/post-punk music.

-echoedruins (on twitter)

ps. thanks for the heads up on google buzz.. retweeted ;)

[karen2205]

Privacy concerns about gmail go back years:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/4707 (yes, dismissing the concerns, but evidence that the concerns were there and being talked about in geeky places online)
http://www.gmail-is-too-creepy.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail
http://epic.org/privacy/gmail/faq.html

Not that that's any excuse for being rude to people who've been caught out by google buzz, but the possibility has always been there and isn't something I'm all that surprised by.

[reddragdiva]

gmail-is-too-creepy is courtesy Daniel Brandt, who is a gibbering nutcase. As I've had the joy of dealing with for too many years on Wikipedia, who also told him to fuck off.

But yes, the rest is useful :-)

Basically, putting stuff in someone else's cloud is risky. But I submit that there is an implicit expectation that they won't pull the sort of crap Google just did with Buzz. I speak as a happy Gmail user of six years who really, really doesn't want Google to fuck this up.

[pseudomonas]

Yeah. I can't figure out who can see what about me, what I've signed up for, who can find my identity by going via my contacts, and so on.

As an example, is the opposite of "Allow people to contact me (without showing my email address)" "allow no-one to contact me" or "show everyone my email address"?

Going to http://www.google.com/profiles/[myusername] shows a no-profile error page, which suits me just fine.

I'm a professional geek, and sometime web-developer, and this is waay confusing me. Bollocks to the people who say "oh, well, if you want to have privacy you shouldn't be using technology".

[barbedwirekiss.livejournal.com]

Anything on this weekend?

Departure, at the Elixir Bar, Mornington Crescent, from 8pm.. free in.

Fangtasia, South of the Border, Old Street, from 9pm... £7

Ghost of lemora, Purple Turtle, Mornington Cresent, from 7pm ... £7

Louder than f*ck... small bar at The Garage, Highbury corner, from 9pm ... £4

Invisible Monsters, The Others, Stoke Newington, from 9pm... free in

Electric Dreams 13th Birthday, Purple Turtle, Mornington Crescent, from 11pm.... £5


... and that's just for tonight! Still looking for ideas? :)

[steer.livejournal.com]

That privacy flaws thing is a real crock -- sorry but really. Personal danger my arse. What she means is that she suddenly realises the personal info that was out there and blames google. That's because she's stupid not because google did anything wrong.

[reddragdiva]

Suddenly publicising your most frequent contacts to the world without warning? No, that's actually bad.

[reddragdiva]

"It's the anti-rape campaigner's own fault" is really not a sentence that should get past anyone's brainstem. - wechsler

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

"I live in my Gmail"

Now whose fault is that?

[reddragdiva]

Well, indeed. I've been a big fan of the service for the past six years. Also, I have reasonable competence with obtuse engineer-designed interfaces. And am a big boy and can take care of myself.

None of which has any relevance to the seriousness of the problems with Buzz.

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

Why do people even fill out that crap on websites if they don't want or expect it to be available somehow? Or, perhaps more relevantly, why do they fill it out with true information?

[reddragdiva]

In this case (per the fine link), Google helpfully compiled a list of favoured email contacts and publicly posted them without asking.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_inbetween_/]

Thank you for the heads-up - I had turned off Buzz, I never had a profile or reader, and yet more following happened.

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

Google sometimes seem to have a case of institutional Asperger's Syndrome. They do the technical stuff really well, but are tone-deaf to the nuances of how social things work. This is evident in their (technically impressive, if practically not quite right) attempts at competing with other social platforms (Picasa vs. Flickr, Google Friend Connect which stagnated until Facebook showed them how it's done and took their lunch, &c.), and most recently in getting so swept up in the technical niftiness of automatically inferring social graphs to miss the pretty bloody obvious differences between private contact lists and public declarations of friendship.

Having said that, I'm not convinced that this is as catastrophic as you say. Google aren't the only one who have made such mistakes (Facebook had their privacy snafus, for example), and hopefully they'll lift their game. (Aside: bradfitz now works at Google on, among other things, their Social Graph API. Hopefully he'll be involved in future Google social pletforms, as he seems to get privacy (as evident in LiveJournal).)

[reddragdiva]

Facebook are negligent verging on malice. They have that reputation, Google so far haven't. This is very disappointing.

[mirabehn.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much for this, and also for taking people up on the victim-blaming. Not everybody is a vastly knowledgeable geek. I'd count myself as relatively well-informed and I didn't know much of this (though it doesn't surprise me).

I turned Buzz on briefly out of fairly lurid curiosity to see what it was like, and then turned it off again immediately when I realise it was blatantly useless. Didn't realise there were still risks even once I'd turned it off[1] - have now cleaned out my profile, as you suggest.


[1] Talking of which, *how* lacking in obviousness is that "Turn Off Buzz" link? Dude. :-S

[reddragdiva]

Do spread the word to everyone possible, feel free to link here. Google Buzz is symptomatic of dangerous stupidity and needs to be buried in a hole as quickly and decisively as possible.

re your edit

[nyecamden.livejournal.com]

xxx

Re: re your edit

[greylock.livejournal.com]

That image would be better if there was a smudged smiley face in the circle, and a curved well done at the bottom -- outside the circle.

It would remind me of school, in the days before scratch'n'sniff.

[(Anonymous)]

"It's up to those of us who understand this stuff to help those that don't, not shit on them for not being us."

This should be tattooed on the inside of the eyelids of every proto-BOfH. And let's face it, me; I can be an ass sometimes too.

[kest]

In my opinion, when you can't take two seconds to figure out that you're not where you wanted to be (see the comments) that's your own fault. If you're smart and using all the braincells in your power and still can't figure it out, then something is wrong. I also really wish all of these wannabe social companies would figure out the idea of OPT-IN. Hell, you can even ask me if I want to be asked about every single fucking thing or if I want your system to set me up automagically. Computers are great like that. Software installations have been doing it for years. And if I am in control of my choices, *then* and only then is there nobody to blame but myself.

One for sysadmins

[(Anonymous)]

Looking at the profile thing, it's also pulling in info from webmaster tools (Specifically, sites associated with your account).

If you're using a personal gmail account for access to Google Webmaster Tools for your work site(s), you might want to consider changing that (as I am about to). That kind of info probably shouldn't be folded into your social graph.

[shara.livejournal.com]

Says the totally unknowledgable non-geek who is rabidly descending into Luddism:

Should I concern myself with turning anything on/off if I have a gmail account I do not and have never used? I signed up Once Upon A Time to chat with my brother-in-law and, afaik, have not knowingly used it since. Oh, except I seem perpetually signed in when I use Google. And maybe I have a half-set-up blogfeed? Honestly, all this integration is maddening to me. I want to know when I'm using a program or service. I like one program at a time, single use programs with nothing to do with each other. :/

[jauncourt.livejournal.com]

Holy flaming shit on a stick, thank you.

I recently had the pleasure of having a communication from, then blocking, on slavebook, an ex who is spectacularly repugnant and a predator of young girls.

At least slavebook lets you block these sorts of people and lets them stay blocked. I'm kind of frightened about buzz now. I have hidden my info in buzz (there's less there than in my blogger profile, and it's only showing my pseudonym), but there seems to be no way to turn it off. At all.

Charming.

[mouseworks.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I use gmail with pop and smtp and would have had no idea this crap existed. I only log in periodically to mark something spam, hadn't for a couple of weeks.

If I wanted my email to be the hub of a social network, I'd have used my yahoo mail (which I have never even logged into).

Anyone have a recommendation for a reliable cheap mail service?

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

fastmail.fm is good stuff. If you want much storage you pay, but not outrageously.

[unagothae.livejournal.com]

You haven't been reading LJ? You have missed the best 18 months of my life so far. And it's only going to get better from here. You knew I was awesome long ago. In the last 18 months, I have figured out just how awesome and have been kicking ass and taking names.

Of course, the only pertinent detail is that I have been accepted to the school I want to go to and am fighting like hell to get the funding. I even applied for a scholarship. Also, I am Writing. Still not getting paid for it, but producing enough material that I am getting a feel for which market(s) I may be able to sell my stuff to.

And just to post something on topic, I love her and I am fucking sick that this has happened to her and to all of the other people with privacy concerns. It is exactly why I delete frequently and avoid putting information into profiles. Even so, I leave a wide trail and worry about my privacy because things like this keep happening and getting worse each time they do. This is always why I am a bit of a Luddite.

[redcountess]

Don't have Buzz and I just checked and don't have a profile set up. Mea Culpa about Facebook but I use what privacy settings they do offer and try to educate others there who aren't as net savvy. I just wish they'd create a secure log in page!

[lirion.livejournal.com]

She's updated, to downgrade her angst to Screw You Google (http://fugitivus.wordpress.com/2010/02/12/screw-you-google/)

At least they worked fast.

[reddragdiva]

Apparently Google considers that being in danger of being killed by your stalker is correctly described as a "poor product experience."

[hestia.livejournal.com]

Yaaaaaah! This shit scares me. I'm about to be researching paranoid people there's going to be a bunch of projections bouncing around and I really need my online privacy.

I do not know WTF to do except delete every profile I have and that's a hell of a lot of profiles. (I've been away from uni for 18 months with nothing else to do but housework and breastfeeding.)

[lpetersson.livejournal.com]

Now I'm suddenly a sad bear because I don't have a gmail/buzz account and therefore can't join in with some righteous indignation...