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Having thought about it some more, Google is in deep and immediate trouble. They need to act swiftly (in days) and decisively to get on top of this before publ

Having thought about it some more, Google is in deep and immediate trouble. They need to act swiftly (in days) and decisively to get on top of this before public perception gets out of hand. Simply put, Google can NOT afford to have public opinion turn against their opt-out model. Their whole vision depends on opt-out. But think about what a week or two of stories like this will do. Opt-out will become synonymous with evil. Then how dows Google Book's stance to authors look? How do all their other auto-data collection techniques look? Google depends on opt-out to their very core, down to robots.txt. They can't afford public opinion to turn against that, and it's going to if they don't move fast.

anigbrowl 17y ago
Entirely agree. You and I know how Google works, but most people think they either configure their servers manually or that they supervise them all in real time. It's like those stories of a dead person receiving a computer-generated bill or debtor's letter - there's no malice intended, but it makes everyone feel bad and damages the reputation of the organization involved.
ConceptDog 17y ago
The majority of people don't and will never care about their privacy, particularly when connected to the internet. People who feel harmed by this will be upset and will hopefully understand that they were far more vulnerable than they believed, then take steps to insure that it doesn't happen again. Some people will feign indignation at whats happened to her, claim to be boycotting google, then abandon the prospect when they see how much of a pain it is to change to another service. Most people will never hear about this, and if they do, they won't really care. GMail works for them, they don't understand or care about their privacy. They have a service that works and is implied to be free.
- mattmanser 17y ago
  There is a MASSIVE difference between not knowing and not caring.
  - calcnerd256 17y ago
    the latter can cause the former
mbrubeck 17y ago
Their privacy improvements last night[1] look good on a technical level, but they don't fully address either the underlying user confusion, or the PR issue (they haven't offered a sincere apology). [1]: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/millions-of-buzz-users-and-improvements.html http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/millions-of-buzz-users...

anigbrowl 17y ago

Entirely agree. You and I know how Google works, but most people think they either configure their servers manually or that they supervise them all in real time. It's like those stories of a dead person receiving a computer-generated bill or debtor's letter - there's no malice intended, but it makes everyone feel bad and damages the reputation of the organization involved.

ConceptDog 17y ago

The majority of people don't and will never care about their privacy, particularly when connected to the internet. People who feel harmed by this will be upset and will hopefully understand that they were far more vulnerable than they believed, then take steps to insure that it doesn't happen again. Some people will feign indignation at whats happened to her, claim to be boycotting google, then abandon the prospect when they see how much of a pain it is to change to another service. Most people will never hear about this, and if they do, they won't really care. GMail works for them, they don't understand or care about their privacy. They have a service that works and is implied to be free.

mattmanser 17y ago
There is a MASSIVE difference between not knowing and not caring.
- calcnerd256 17y ago
  the latter can cause the former

mbrubeck 17y ago

Their privacy improvements last night[1] look good on a technical level, but they don't fully address either the underlying user confusion, or the PR issue (they haven't offered a sincere apology). [1]: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/millions-of-buzz-users-and-improvements.html http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/millions-of-buzz-users...