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No, they wouldn't. I'm saying this as somebody who built a product around identifying your 'inner circle' from your email patterns[1]. The part I spent the most

No, they wouldn't. I'm saying this as somebody who built a product around identifying your 'inner circle' from your email patterns[1]. The part I spent the most time on was figuring out how to protect people's privacy, and these scenarios were painfully obvious even to me. Plenty of people at Google have to have thought this through, but decided the benefits to adoption of the current process outweigh the privacy problems that will happen to some people. That's pretty evil in my book... [1] http://web.mailana.com/demoday/ http://web.mailana.com/demoday/

fnid2 17y ago
What are the benefits? Why couldn't they just have a lightbox appear that says, "Yay! We've invented google buzz, here's a list of people we gathered from your frequent contacts in gmail. Click the check boxes by the people you want to include in your inner circle, or click here to disable Google Buzz."
- Poiesis 17y ago
  The lightbox: the new modal dialog. "User! Answer this question! Now!" Our user generally doesn't really care about your new feature if they're logging in to check mail; they want to--wait for it--check their mail. Just like users everywhere, they're just going to click on a random button and not even be able to tell you five seconds later whether it said "Go Away" or "Reveal My Location To My Abusive Ex-Husband And All His Friends". [edit:formatting]
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - danieldon 17y ago
    "they want to--wait for it--check their mail" Neither Gmail nor Yahoo are strictly email anymore. If you believe they are are, you're living in a fantasy world. Both have chat, and yahoo even has stuff like calendar and notes. "Webmail" isn't strictly email and it hasn't been for years. "Reveal My Location To My Abusive Ex-Husband And All His Friends" What all of the rabid people like you fail to realize is that no information was actually revealed to anyone in this instance. It was a combination of her misunderstand and a bug in google reader that displayed follower/following lists wrong. Of course, none of you actually care about the facts, you just want to complain.
- petewarden 17y ago
  That's the route I went (opt-in) but a large chunk of people just don't understand what on earth that means and end up inviting nobody. Defaults really matter, especially for new concepts like this.
- encoderer 17y ago
  well, of course, if they'd have done that, they wouldn't have been able to easily leverage their gmail base into some pseudo facebook competitor. They cannot meet their business needs AND your privacy needs at the same time. So..... Don't be evil, indeed.

fnid2 17y ago

What are the benefits? Why couldn't they just have a lightbox appear that says, "Yay! We've invented google buzz, here's a list of people we gathered from your frequent contacts in gmail. Click the check boxes by the people you want to include in your inner circle, or click here to disable Google Buzz."

Poiesis 17y ago
The lightbox: the new modal dialog. "User! Answer this question! Now!" Our user generally doesn't really care about your new feature if they're logging in to check mail; they want to--wait for it--check their mail. Just like users everywhere, they're just going to click on a random button and not even be able to tell you five seconds later whether it said "Go Away" or "Reveal My Location To My Abusive Ex-Husband And All His Friends". [edit:formatting]
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- danieldon 17y ago
  "they want to--wait for it--check their mail" Neither Gmail nor Yahoo are strictly email anymore. If you believe they are are, you're living in a fantasy world. Both have chat, and yahoo even has stuff like calendar and notes. "Webmail" isn't strictly email and it hasn't been for years. "Reveal My Location To My Abusive Ex-Husband And All His Friends" What all of the rabid people like you fail to realize is that no information was actually revealed to anyone in this instance. It was a combination of her misunderstand and a bug in google reader that displayed follower/following lists wrong. Of course, none of you actually care about the facts, you just want to complain.
petewarden 17y ago
That's the route I went (opt-in) but a large chunk of people just don't understand what on earth that means and end up inviting nobody. Defaults really matter, especially for new concepts like this.
encoderer 17y ago
well, of course, if they'd have done that, they wouldn't have been able to easily leverage their gmail base into some pseudo facebook competitor. They cannot meet their business needs AND your privacy needs at the same time. So..... Don't be evil, indeed.