Flexing its internet muscles, Google recently jumped on the social media bandwagon with Buzz — its most ambitious attempt to marry the Gmail Web interface with status updates and media-sharing technology in an attempt to solicit the social media junkies to spend more time on Google’s sites than on competitors like Facebook or Twitter. However, the lack of clarity on the privacy settings and the outrage shown by the users may result in a knockout punch.

Though Google has announced some changes to Google Buzz addressing the privacy concerns with the new service, it already may have been too little too late.  Early users found the privacy settings confusing and very complicated to maneuver – especially the ability to hide one’s followers. This earned them very strident criticism and all out venomous customer feedback, along with a mass “turn off buzz” reaction.

Even for those who are okay with revealing more of their self in the social media world, there was also some assumption on the part of Google, that they may have mistakenly considered insight, where they assumed the most frequent people emailed from user’s Gmail accounts would be the same people with whom those users would want to share Buzz updates. Have they never heard what happens when you assume? One would think with all the focus on the security of information in social media sites such as Facebook in recent weeks, Google would be more ahead of the curve on this one.

Cnet.com referred to this public relations debacle in their aptly titled post “Google Buzz: Privacy nightmare.” Buzz hasn’t impressed users, even without the privacy issues. Inflated notices of new “Buzz” available only to find duplicates and retweets of the same news post and the fact that all the annoying features are set by an “opt-out” status — which means unless you know about them you can’t stop them – makes the user’s first impression of Google’s Buzz, well, kind of a buzz kill.

Some people think the fear regarding privacy on the web is over exaggerated. Technorati recently referred to Google’s approach as “revolutionary” in their post “Google Buzz Privacy Fears Overstated”. The author believes concern over privacy on the Internet is antiquated and users need to get used to the idea that what we do on the Internet is not private. It seems like there should be a happy medium somewhere in this that we can all live with comfortably.

Melody K. Smith, March 2, 2010

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