Google Buzz lets Pervs stalk your Kids

This is the sort of headline every service must dread*, and for the much battered Google Buzz it comes from a near unimpeachable source - Social Media doyenne Charlene Li of Altimeter who saw that what her 4th Grade daughter was chatting to friends about was public on Google Buzz:

But what was most disturbing was looking at her friends’ conversations and realizing that some of them were chatting with complete strangers, and in some cases, sharing personal information like emails. Absolutely terrifying as these are 4th graders who have no clue.

I quickly turned off Google Buzz, (but I didn’t totally disable it, more on that below), dashed off an email to the parents of the friends she had been chatting with inside of Buzz (again, all in public, with their real names), and then finally took a long hard look at the situation.

She found, for example, that “iorgyinbathrooms” was following her child. Also, that Google is less than careful with the age of GMail users:

... I discovered that buried in Google’s terms of service somewhere is that children under the age of 13 are not allowed to have Gmail accounts. But unlike Facebook, which requires that people enter their birthdates when setting up accounts, Google makes no such attempt to educate people signing up for Gmail that such a provision is in place. As a result, while Google is absolved of responsibility because of the TOS, it could and should do a better job of complying with the Child Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

This follows hot on the heels of Buzz being accused of all sorts of adult privacy errors including re-installing abusive ex husbands as stalkers, but as an issue this one trumps everything to date - and not even the Silicon Valley A List Apologistas that have defended Buzz to date will dare bat this one away.

Yet again, as we wrote in our piece about Buzz being a slow motion train wreck, it has been the total inability of a young, male, (probably largely) childless techie elite to imagine what the average user's life and concerns look like, and Google's systemic inability to rein them in that has led to this unnecessary situation (you would have thought that the hoo-ha last weekend would have sent alarm bells ringing on this sort of issue).

*Strictly speaking it was "New Google Buzz Privacy Nightmare: Scumbags Can Follow Your Kids!" from SAI which then pointed to Charlene's article. I merely translated it for a UK Sun-reading audience