Buzz is Google's Beacon

As we noted in our review of Buzz, one of the worrying things it does is expose your email contacts list for all and sundry to see. As others are tumbling onto this one the buzz about Buzz being a buzztard is growing. Evgeny Morozov has put it very eloquently:

It's business decisions like this that make me very suspicious of Google's highfalutin speeches about their commitment to defending the freedom of expression. From a business perspective, such decisions do make some sense -- how else, after all, can Google Buzz compete with Twitter and Facebook, who are already light years ahead of Google in terms of building up their user base -- but the ethics of such business decisions is extremely shoddy, to say the least. If Google executives are really committed to defending the freedom of expression, then they must be inhabiting in a dream world, where freedom of expression somehow always survives despite horrendous attacks on privacy.

I am coming to the conclusion, after listening to David Cameron last night, that drinking the Social Media Kool Aid produces a cognitive dissonance in which you have to believe that all people are good, all the time (or at least you profess to believe that while you build your service out with minimal privacy safeguards, as that is where the money is)

But watching the emerging kickback on this one, I think Google has - despite no doubt studying the Social Graphs of all the other networks intensely - f*cked up big time in its desperation to link up people's information for its own benefit.

Up to now their social media services have just been lame, this one looks like giving them the sort of rap that Beacon did for Facebook, and this will rebound far wider in my view - for example, I am increasingly looking at Google on my iPhone and thinking - do I want them on my device?.

I predict a few more days of bluster about this being "what we want", then an apology, and a shift to a default no show of email contacts by Sunday evening.

(Update - it's started as of Friday morning - Google is "responding to customer feedback" already! )

And then an attempt to back-door reintroduce it all in 6 months.

(By the way, did you know Buzz works on all iPhones but not on most Android phones, only those with v 2.0. Nothing like supporting your own mobile developers' efforts eh