I'm not calling anyone "evil," but . . .

Since Google has apologized and reconfigured Buzz, should I perhaps accept their apology and return to my use of their products? I don't think so, for reasons explained by Kontra:

Unsure of its ability to successfully roll it out as an independent product, Google must have then decided to force feed Buzz through its Gmail user base of 175 million. Google executives likely reckoned that in a single day Buzz would garner more users than Twitter has been able to in two years after all that celebrity publicity. That really is why Gmail users woke up one day to find their private account details exposed to the public, unannounced and unprepared, because without such default exposure Google executives likely didn’t believe they could deliver a critical user base for Buzz. That’s not “improper testing,” it’s a platform strategy. And the fact that Google reacted quickly to public pressure doesn’t negate the fact that its arrogance was thoroughly exposed. The correction isn’t significant, the exposed intentions are.

And those intentions are clearly to become dominant in the world of social networking. But I am interested in participating in social networking only in limited and targeted ways, and consciously avoid most soc-net sites. So Google’s intentions run counter to my intentions. Thus we shall (largely if not completely) part company.

It turns out that Fastmail is a fabulous email provider, by the way, and when I’m using my iPhone it’s a relief not to have to deal with Google’s bizarre implementation of IMAP. I think I like this new Google-free (or limited-Google) world.

buzz off, Google

So the other day I read about Google Buzz; it sounded interesting, so I clicked the link and went to the site. On that page was a brief description of Buzz and two choices: one, larger and in bright colors, said something to the effect of “Sure, I’ll try Buzz!” The other, in plain and smaller letters, said “Nah, just take me to my inbox.” I clicked on the large one, and in the next hour discovered that my Google Reader page was now filled with other people’s links and comments, and that Google was doing its very best to populate my Gmail inbox similarly — only being limited in its power to do so by the paucity of information I had entered on my Google Profile page. (Even so, Google on my behalf sent out Buzz invitations to people in my contacts list.) Any Google user who had given more information on their own profile pages now had exposed to any other Google users the list of people they most often emailed and chatted with. So if a man had been emailing with a manager of a company where he was thinking about taking a job, his current employer could find that out. Or if that man had been emailing with a lawyer because he was considering a lawsuit against his employer . . . or (we have discreditable secrets too) if he had been chatting with a woman other than his wife. . . . Google decided without directly informing its users that all those connections should be public knowledge.

As Evgeny Morozov wrote, “If I were working for the Iranian or the Chinese government, I would immediately dispatch my Internet geek squads to check on Google Buzz accounts for political activists and see if they have any connections that were previously unknown to the government. They can then spend months on end drawing complex social circles on the shiny blackboards inside secret police headquarters.”

This response to a shockingly tone-deaf post by Berin Szoka summarizes the issues nicely.

Google has since made minor changes to the system, but overall has been anything but apologetic: responding to an inquiry from the New York Times, “Todd Jackson, product manager for Gmail and Google Buzz . . . defended the setup of the Buzz service. He said that Buzz came with a built-in circle of contacts to provide a better experience to users and that many liked that feature."

I had already been frustrated by Google’s earlier decisions to make certain of their services more “social” — more than a year ago, for instance, my Reader started informing me of the number of people who liked certain links, and flashed in my face the number of “new sharing requests” that had come my way, despite my desperate attempts to turn off every possible venue for “sharing.” So Buzz is not a one-time misstep my Google, but rather a consolidation of a self-defining stance.

My response: after five years and 25,000 email messages, I have abandoned Gmail and Google Calendar. I have deleted all my Google Reader subscriptions, and deleted all my contacts. My principle is a simple one: Google will not determine and range and nature of my social connections, I will. The only thing keeping me from deleting my Google account altogether is, to be truthful, this blog, which is hosted by Blogger. So I’m stuck with Google for at least a while longer — but the first minute that I am able to delete that account, I will do so.

Now back to healing!