Lawmakers Ask For FTC Investigation of Google Buzz 131
angry tapir writes "Eleven US lawmakers have asked the FTC to investigate Google's launch of its Buzz social-networking product for breaches of consumer privacy. The representatives — six Democrats and five Republicans from the House Energy and Commerce Committee — noted in their letter that Google's roll-out of Buzz exposed private information of users to Google's Gmail service to outsiders. In one case, a 9-year-old girl accidentally shared her contact list in Gmail with a person who has a 'sexually charged' username, the lawmakers said in the letter."
The letter itself... (Score:3, Informative)
Weird that nobody who reported on this linked to the original letter.
I went looking for it primarily to get the complete list of signers:
Joe Barton (TX), Frank Pallone (NJ), Mike Rogers (MI), Jan Schakowsky (IL), Tim Murphy (PA), Bruce Braley (IA), Mike Burgess (TX), G.K. Butterfield (NC), Steve Scalise (LA), and Donna Christensen (V.I.)
I was expecting to see someone from Redmond, WA in there...
Re:Just a thought... (Score:3, Informative)
I keep hearing how others were set to auto-follow others. I did not have this experience. Buzz suggested people for me to follow from my Contacts, but I didn't auto-follow anyone.
Re:Just a thought... (Score:5, Informative)
The auto-follow feature was set for people you had repeated correspondence with - i.e. lots of gmail conversations.
In other words, this 9 year old wasn't introduced to the person with the "sexually charged username", whatever the hell that means, the kid had been talking to this guy many times well before Buzz launched.
Buzz just made it plain that the two had been corresponding for some time now.
I swear, politicians have to be some of the dumbest fucking people on earth, it drives me insane sometimes.
Some perspective (Score:5, Informative)
Google has changed Buzz to address privacy concerns multiple times. In fact they made so many changes so quickly that it's hard to document exactly what settings it had when without a lot of research. However early on it was easily possible to have the following scenario:
"InnocentUser," a legal adult, has a Gmail account. (Let's even say they got one sometime after July 2009, so Gmail wasn't even in "beta" at the time, just to end-run one particular argument.) They've emailed a number of people using this account. They've also gotten several scary emails from "ImaPredator," which they never responded to.
When Buzz was launched InnocentUser's Google Profile was indexed. The easiest way for this to happen was to "try out" Buzz like Google urged everyone with a Gmail account. However numerous people have reported finding they had their Google Profile indexed without ever actually trying Buzz.
Once your Google Profile was automatically integrated with Buzz it would auto-follow anyone who you emailed with a lot. So InnocentUser has a lot of their usual contacts auto-followed and made visible in their Google Profile. Meanwhile ImaPredator joins Buzz, which notices they emailed InnocentUser a lot (regardless of the fact that InnocentUser never emailed back,) and auto-follows them. Now ImaPredator can go to InnocentUser's Google Profile and see the list of their most common contacts.
That's pretty bad. Of course it's even worse that perhaps InnocentUser did email back ImaPredator once, with a message saying something like "If you ever email me again I'm going to report you to the police." That's good enough for Buzz to decide InnocentUser ought to auto-follow ImaPredator as well! (Once of the people Buzz set me up to auto-follow was someone who i had a single email exchange with. Perhaps because it occurred very shortly before Buzz went live.)
There _was_ an option to disable Buzz. However initially at least all that did was remove the Buzz UI from your end. Your profile was still visible to others and still listed your regular contacts. CNET and other sites published detailed tutorials about how to _actually_ go through all the options and disable Buzz "for realz" because of all the privacy concerns.
When the inevitable, and in my mind quite justified, complaints started, Google went through several rounds of apologizing (but usually with weasel wording such as "we're sorry our users feel like their privacy has been violated" rather than "we're sorry we screwed up") and revising Buzz's behaviour and options. After the third or so revision they reached the point where it was halfway reasonable, and it was fairly easy for everyone who still didn't like it to actually turn it off.
Google definitely did something stupid. If they made the decision to auto-include everyone with a Gmail account in Buzz because they thought it was the only way to catch up with Facebook and Twitter in a reasonable amount of time then what they did could arguably be considered Evil as well. It's unfortunate that the lawmakers are pulling the "think of the children" card when Google clearly did something wrong regardless of the age of the people involved, but that doesn't somehow magically invalidate the wrongness. Google did try to correct things after the fact, but that doesn't change the fact that they did something wrong to begin with, and it's quite possible that some people were hurt by Google's mistakes before changes were implemented.
Certainly a slap on the wrist by the FCC would not be out of line. And an investigation into whether the issues were due to professional negligence or... whatever you call screwing over your users for a "quick buck," also seems quite reasonable to me. If something actually criminal was done (i leave it up to the actual lawyers to determine what would and would not be criminal in this case) then apologizing for it before the "police" actually catch you isn't enough to get you out of trouble. It doesn't work that way for the average citizen and it shouldn't work that way for corporations either.
Re:There. Fixed that for you. (Score:4, Informative)
Normally I am the first one up with the "parents need to be responsible for what their kids are doing" flag. I was raised at a time when there wasn't much concern/awareness of sexual predators, skinned knees, occasional fights and so on and we were allowed, by parents considered to be quite conscientious for the time, to run free to an extent that today would get most kids seized by child welfare. And I certainly don't want to live in a society that is run at the level of the lowest common denominator of human intelligence and emotional sensibilities.
But there has to be an element of realism to all this. Even the best of parents cannot monitor their children 24/7. Do the kids have access to a computer anywhere else, like say at school? Well then how can a parent control that? Do the kids ever visit their friend's house where there is a computer? Then, other than never letting their kids visit the homes of their friends, how can the parents exercise absolute control over that?
And let's not forget the most important thing... kids are smart and learning 24/7 how to do what they want to do and unless parents are spending 24/7 trying to keep ahead of the the kid's learning curve then the kids will get access to things without the knowledge of their parents.... or at least without the real-time knowledge of their parents. Want to bet who knows more about smart phones - an average 12 year old or an average 35 year old? I'd bet on the 12 year old.
So let's start from the realistic premise that even good parents cannot monitor their kids at all times. And let's also realize that even good parents cannot instil adult level sensibility in a child, i.e. kids do dumb/dangerous/risky/strange things because they are kids.
If you accept that premise then one question that arises will be what can the rest of us (sometimes known as society) do to protect kids from their more dangerous activities? And the next question might be "will enacting that protection harm the rights of adults (sometimes known as society) to a degree that makes it difficult to justify the benefit received by the children?"