"F#*@ You, Google."

Google continues to take heat over its new uber-anti-privacy-architecture. Tts new Buzz application makes an important error in assuming that every link between nodes (email addresses) implies homophily, and that greater connectedness between nodes implies greater homophily. Not so, explains Fugitivus ever so patiently:

I use my private Gmail account to email my boyfriend and my mother. There’s a BIG drop-off between them and my other “most frequent” contacts. You know who my third most frequent contact is? My abusive ex-husband.

Which is why it’s SO EXCITING, Google, that you AUTOMATICALLY allowed all my most frequent contacts access to my Reader, including all the comments I’ve made on Reader items, usually shared with my boyfriend, who I had NO REASON to hide my current location or workplace from, and never did.

My other most frequent contacts? Other friends of Flint’s.

Oh, also, people who email my ANONYMOUS blog account, which gets forwarded to my personal account. They are frequent contacts as well. Most of them, they are nice people. Some of them are probably nice but a little unbalanced and scary. A minority of them — but the minority that emails me the most, thus becoming FREQUENT — are psychotic men who think I deserve to be raped because I keep a blog about how I do not deserve to be raped, and this apparently causes the Hulk rage.

Fuck you, Google. My privacy concerns are not trite. They are linked to my actual physical safety, and I will now have to spend the next few days maintaining that safety by continually knocking down followers as they pop up. A few days is how long I expect it will take before you either knock this shit off, or I delete every Google account I have ever had and use Bing out of fucking spite.

Fuck you, Google. You have destroyed over ten years of my goodwill and adoration, just so you could try and out-MySpace MySpace.

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Google: Good at Buzzwords

So "Google-Buzz" was inflicted upon the Gmail-user community over the past 36 hours and is still the number 2 trending Twitter topic. Already Google has been accused of plagiarizing Twitter and Facebook, and of a stealth attack on Gmail users' privacy.

Many of these concerns are well-placed, especially now that Google is in bed with the intelligence community. But my initial reaction is more pedestrian: why the heck would I want my Facebook in my Gmail account? One is for work, the other is for fun; I need to keep them separate or neither serves its function.

Sure, the trope is catchy. But Google needs better marketing researchers. The "buzz" I experienced when hit by the sensory overload that greeted me this morning was less like a vibrant global coffee-house than like an annoying, randy pair of flies in my office distracting and irritating me as I desperately tried to get some writing done. I waved goodbye to Google last fall when I realized that the Google-Wave app allowed people to see my thoughts as I typed them (wtf?), and I'm likely to buzz off in this case as well. Some things just don't need to be imitated, and frankly Google doesn't need to try that hard.

How do you find it so far?

P.S. By the way, if you're wondering how to turn Buzz off once you've tried it, Google doesn't make it easy but it is possible: go all the way down to the bottom of the page and look for a weeny little "turn off buzz" button.

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