Google buzz and post-privacy
Google’s new “Buzz” application has a strange—and deeply suspect—privacy logic.
Once you enable Buzz, the default setting reveals your Buzz “follower” list on your public Google profile. It does this before it presents you with a setting to switch it off.
This wouldn’t be such a problem if Google didn’t automatically populate your profile with the people who you email and chat with using Gmail and Google chat, but that’s exactly what it does.
This means that your Gmail and chat contacts are displayed to the world on your public profile until you go back into the settings and disable this “feature.”
Email differs fundamentally from online social networking. Nobody seriously believes (unencrypted) email to be fully private, and we often send emails in the knowledge that somebody could easily send them along to another party without our knowledge. Indeed, legally, many countries have adopted the view that there is no expectation of privacy in internal corporate email correspondence.
There are many personal and professional contexts in which auto-generated Buzz profiles could be highly problematic for individuals. But if you are a political activist in an authoritarian state, the problem could be particularly severe. Who is to stop the authorities snooping around Buzz profiles that have been unwittingly activated and made public?
There are many reasons why Google have adopted this model, but one backdrop is the emergence over the last six months of what we might call a “post-privacy” discourse in Silicon Valley, spurred on Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and embodied in his company’s decision to make Facebook profiles public by default—albeit with many user-controllable constraints on what is disclosed.
But for most people, most of the time, privacy in the real world is a continuum: our expectations differ markedly according to the context. The expectation of privacy in email is much stronger than it is in online social network environments. By not properly empowering individuals to opt out of disclosing their contacts, Google has made a mistake.
