Chaos Program

The big tech story of the week is the one about Google making people mad with it’s new “Buzz” service. The most interesting aspect of this story is that everyone seems to have gotten it wrong.

Here’s the short version of the story: Google has some new social media application that makes all your email contacts into “friends” in the social networking sense and a lot of people objected to that, claiming that email contacts should be kept private, not advertised to the world as a friends list. This is stupid on so many levels – Google, their users, all the “analysts” – it’s hard to know where to start. So I’ll start at the beginning as far as I knew it.

The other morning, as I do most mornings, I brought up my gmail account and glanced to see if there was anything new. There was some kind of banner or thing about something called “Buzz.” I immediately thought “Hmm. Could this be a whack at Yahoo’s boring Buzz bookmarking service?” But no. I saw that my boss had already been there and made a comment. I also saw that to reply to his comment I had to create a “profile” that would make all of my email contacts into friends who I could then get Buzzy with, or some such thing.

I decided not to create the profile because I don’t use my gmail account for general email purposes. I have a yahoo account for that. My gmail account is mostly for poetry and other writing. I use it to communicate with the members of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, a lot of editors and a few close friends and family. It’s the kind of account – intentionally – receives the kind of joke emails that people forward all the time. In other words, while it’s a public address, I tend to use it for more private purposes.

Weirdly, Buzz shows that I have 6 followers, including 4 who do not have public profiles – which I also do not have. How do you follow someone who does not have a profile to follow? And if you don’t have a profile, how is it possible to follow someone else without a profile? What the hell is going on here?

Anyway, notice the one interesting bit here: The complaint the privacy advocates have is that this new Buzz thing is advertising information people want kept private and that Google should have given them more warning of that fact. Google did give warning – enough that I decided not to sign up for the thing (but it still tells me there’s new stuff for me to look at there, which I find truly annoying). But, apparently, a lot of people failed to notice the warning and are mad AT GOOGLE FOR THEIR OWN FAILURE TO READ.

Don’t take my word for it. Here are some links to stories about privacy concerns with Gmail Buzz:

• http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/11/google_buzz_privacy/
• http://www.businessinsider.com/warning-google-buzz-has-a-huge-privacy-flaw-2010-2
• http://abh-news.com/google-buzz-privacy-issues-for-gmail-users-1126.html
• http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/12/AR2010021201490.html

Believe it or not, this was highly predictable. At a previous job I used to take help desk calls sometimes (It wasn’t exactly my job but it had to be done). One of the things I found amazing was how often someone would call up complaining about an error message when they tried to do something and then not know what the error message was. The conversation went something like this:

Idiot User: “Hi. I’m trying to use [name application here] and it doesn’t work.”
Me: “What do you mean it doesn’t work? Does it give you an error message?”
Idiot User: “Yeah. It does.”
Me: “What does the error message say?”
Idiot User: “I don’t know. I just clicked okay.”

Of course, it’s impossible to diagnosis a problem when the only symptom is that you clicked okay but that’s not important right now. What’s important is that it is perfectly and absolutely normal for people to look for that little “okay” button and click it WITHOUT READING ANYTHING ELSE. For Google’s Gmail Buzz and any other service anyone ever wants to create the implication of this long standing and widely known user behavior is that people will almost alays accept the defaults, even if it is not in their best interests to do so.

As Facebook has shown many times and Google has proved yet again, when people accept the defaults without even looking at them and later find out there was something about those defaults they didn’t like, THEY’LL BLAME YOU, NOT THEMSELVES. Therefore, as Facebook has had shoved in their faces over and over again, forcing users to opt in instead of allowing them to opt out, saves you a lot of bad publicity and hassle down the road.

Yes, the users messed up by not reading. Google’s even bigger mistake was expecting the users to read in the first place (btw: This is an easy mistake to make and despite having articulated the lesson here, I can not claim to be too smart to be immune from this same error. Funny, huh?)

But there’s more that Google did wrong on this one and to understand that, we need to spend a few words discussing social networking theory and practice. Most of the world was introduced to social networking by websites like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter. However, the theory of social networks is not new nor is it restricted to the Internet. The social sciences have long studied the way humans for associational networks and how information and influence travels along those networks.

Also, completely independent of social networking websites, there has long been interest in the way email can be used to learn about a person’s social network. Who do you receive the most emails from? Who do you send the most emails to? A lot can be learned about relationships by studying these things.

I was first exposed to these ideas years ago when I was testing a demo of software being sold to law enforcement as an aid to complex investigations. One of the things the software did was take phone records as input and produce a visual depiction of communication patterns. The idea was that this was how police could find out who was really running the gang they were investigating (though really it would only discover who was running the operations, rather than who was calling the shots but that’s another story). The application to email is obvious.

And this is where Google really tripped up. They have wanted to get involved in the social networking arena for some time (check out orkut.com, for example) but have never found anything that caught fire. Then some genius found out about social science research into using email to examine people’s social networks and thought, “Hey! We’ve already got all their social network info! All we have to do is start using it!”

This completely overlooked an aspect of email that comes up very often when dealing with users (yes, back in my pseudo help desk days): The expectation of privacy. The upshot is that, no matter how many times you tell people that the company reserves the right to monitor their communications, and no matter how often you explain to them that nothing on the internet is truly private, people still think of their email as being private communications. They put their most personal stuff into email, things they wouldn’t want anyone else to know about.

It’s not all just forwarded jokes. It’s stuff that gets dragged into court in cases of sexual harassment, divorce, fraud, product tampering, negligence, even murder (In an unusual twist to that with immense privacy implications, see here). Everything people would ever talk about, and anyone they would ever talk to, can be discovered in their email, including their deepest and most humiliating secrets.

Even people who don’t have humiliating secrets to hide can be very touchy about their email. Even if they only use it for work, that doesn’t mean they want the boss reading it. The flip side to privacy is trust. When someone snoops into someone else’s email, or their contacts, or their desktop files, or whatever, the person whose stuff is being snooped feels distrusted. The response is generally anger.

Contrary to the popular formulation, privacy is important to nearly everyone, not just those who have something to hide. And by exposing people’s email contacts in one huge batch, Google ran head on into this deep need for privacy. They got anger in return. This is the real story. It’s not that Google failed to display their instructions in neon with all kinds of opt in notices to force people to think about what they were doing. It’s that by touching email AT ALL, Google made people worry about who they trusted and who trusted them. Consequently, Google lost trust from some of its users.

In this particular aspect, the users are not at fault. Google made the enormous mistake of thinking of email as a resource to be leveraged. Ironically, they tried to develop a social networking feature without giving enough thought to the social context.

The really funny part about this is that they needn’t have bothered. My second thought when I first saw that there was such a thing as Gmail Buzz, was, “I already have this stuff on Facebook. I don’t need yet another social network.”

UPDATE (same day): I found a link wayyyyy down at the bottom of my gmail page that said “turn off buzz.” So I did. That’s one annoyance out of the way!

UPDATE 2 (also the same day): How did I get all the way through this post without commenting that the backlash on this issue was like Google walked into a buzzsaw?

Tags: email, google, privacy, social networking

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 13th, 2010 at 11:42 am and is filed under Internet, digital business, security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.