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Tell HN: Enabling buzz exposes your full name and contact list on google profile

75 points by metaguri ↗ HN
This caught me by surprise, so I thought I'd share it. You can go back to your google profile settings and uncheck "Display my full name so I can be found in search" and "Display the list of people I'm following and people following me." I think the privacy settings are all around lacking, but this "feature" was pretty opaque to me--they gave me an option to "save" my google profile when enabling buzz, but since I already had one set up I thought this to be an irrelevant step. I had to poke around for a while to realize that my profile had been changed.

21 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 69.5 ms ] thread
jolie
Interesting. Especially since the Google veep and product manager made a big deal this morning about choosing privacy settings.
tokenadult
Good catch. LOUSY default on Google's part.

I previously had a Google Profile, but of course back then it didn't have a checkbox about people following me or people I follow.

houseabsolute
Perhaps Google wants to optimize for the usual case where people don't mind sharing the list of people they are following, which is parity with Twitter and Facebook.
_delirium
It's an unexpected change for me at least, because I've posted on blogspot blogs in the past from my Google account, which makes the comments link to your Google profile if you have one. I expected that the result would be (and it was) a pseudonymous comment with just my first name, which linked to a blank Google profile. If Google sticks my real name and my friends lists on my Google profile without warning, those old comments are retroactively linked to my IRL identity, which wasn't what I expected when I posted them years ago.
Nogwater
Any idea how to make the geo-location feature on buzzes less accurate? I'd be OK with city level, but not block level.
sushi
In the demo, they actually showed you that in Google Buzz you can put GPS at work and it will tell the best possible location and only after you have pressed "OK" it will make it your location.

Google Latitude lets you update your status manually and I tend to put it at city level.

Nogwater
Right, I have the option to choose from many nearby locations but they're all very precise (even if they're not accurate). I want something that's accurate but not precise. It sounds like Goolge Latitude has it. Hopefully they'll add it to Buzz too.
contagionhealth
Defaulting to public vs private settings is something everyone building an app (or platform) where behavioral data (who, where, when, with whom, to do what) is the potential moneymaker faces.

Interesting however that Facebook after Beacon seems to have taken opposite track, while my full Foursquare checkins show up in Google alerts for my usernames.

Think Buzz is making a mistake here in terms of earning consumer trust, but will the 'average' Google user convert to a Buzz user in the first place?

Wondering about search user conversion rates vs. search+docs/apps/gmail etc. conversion rates to Buzz, and if we'll ever see any stats.

antimora
I hate the fact that Google have decided to put the social networking feature into my email utility. Noone should mess with my email! I want just email. I really hope there is a way to disable that feature.
Confusion
There is a very easy and obvious way :)
Confusion
This wasn't meant to be snarky: there is simply a very clear 'disable buzz' link at the bottom of your gmail.
10ren
You could make a filter for it.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
hsuresh
I just checked and found my profile to be private by default.
ScottWhigham
Wait - I don't quite get it. I've just logged into my google profile and both of those boxes are checked. When I visit my profile page from another browser, I cannot see my contact list. I want my full name displayed but not my contacts.

Can someone point out how I can find my contacts from this page? I just don't quite get it, I think.

brown9-2
Do you need a "Google Profile" to be able to use Buzz?
cracki
why yes. how do you think you'll use this without a google account?
brown9-2
They are not the same thing
pasbesoin
Two words: Opt in. Opt in to participating. Especially opt in to making previously private data public.

Opt in is the acceptable choice to pose to users. NOT opt out.

Bah.