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Update: Corrected the story to say that Google stopped having auto-follow features in February.
Google is hyping fixes it made after social networking product Buzz landed the company in hot water with users, privacy groups, and even legislators. The company is trying to have a do-over today, by asking users to go through and re-confirm their privacy settings.
When Google originally launched Buzz, which shares updates from other social services like Twitter and Flickr as well as Google products, it populated the product by having users automatically follow others they frequently communicated with through Google Talk or Gmail.
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While the suggestions were helpful in many cases, they were pretty awkward in others. For example, you might email your boss often, but you might not want to prompt them to check out your vacation photos on Flickr. One enraged user wrote a screed that was widely passed around after she realized Google had automatically allowed her ex-husband, whom she said was abusive, to follow her on the service.
After seeing a user backlash, the company quickly changed course, revoked auto-following and instead began suggesting people to follow. Google’s Buzz team saw the company’s hundreds of millions of Gmail users as an asset in launching a competitor to Twitter and Facebook. But they fundamentally misunderstood how people use email. As critic Danah Boyd said:
“Google got themselves into trouble by launching a public-facing service inside a service that people understand as extremely private.
“Gmail seems like a logical integration point because people visit there regularly, but juxtaposing the two services created a cognitive disconnect in users’ minds. The result? Confused users believed that their emails were being made publicly accessible.”
Starting today, users will see the prompt pictured above when they access Buzz. They will be able to view and edit the people they’re following and the people following them back — with a warning that if they choose to follow someone, that information may be publicly accessible on that person’s profile. They’ll also be able to choose whether they want those lists appearing on their public Google profiles. They can also adjust settings on any sites connected to Buzz like Picasa, Google Reader, or Twitter.
The changes are the latest in a series the company has made to clean up the PR mess the initial launch left behind. During the first week, it made links for blocking followers a lot more visible and allowed users to hide their contacts.
The company had to act fast. The uproar has already piqued the concern of legislators. Nearly a dozen legislators wrote a letter to the FTC earlier this month asking the agency to investigate whether the service violated user privacy.
