More Bad Buzz

So, I’ve finally done a little bit of research into Google Buzz, which launched earlier this week.  I haven’t paid much attention to it because (1) I don’t use my Gmail account all that much to start with, and have relatively few contacts there anyway, and (2) I don’t really use other Google services for things I want kept particularly secret.  But I could see that it was probably going to have all kinds of privacy problems.

So, I did some reading up today on the various inevitable privacy issues.  Further research has indicated that, according to Google, “Your Google Reader shared items, Picasa Web public albums, and Google Chat status messages automatically appear as posts in Buzz.”  “Well,” I thought to myself, “I don’t really use any of those three, so I guess I personally don’t have anything to worry about.”  I don’t use Google Reader, the only stuff that goes into my Picasa Web albums are the photos that also go in my blog because Blogger automatically stores them there – and they don’t go up as public there anyway, and Google Chat has always been way overrated.

But then I thought to myself, wait!  I actually was using Picasa majorly, all week (starting last Saturday) to discuss wedding dress options with lots of people.  I used their public albums to upload hundreds of photos of me in various dresses and didn’t mention it to Nick, because he’s the last one to go poking around online when he’s bored, and, like I said, I hardly ever use Picasa.  (The albums are locked down now that I’ve finally chosen a dress.)

But it turns out that Nick is actually one of my few automatic followers on Buzz, and had I waited just a handful of days to upload all those wedding dress photos to Picasa, he would have gotten emails about all of them.  Which would have sucked; both he and Zeb have specifically requested that my dress be a surprise to Nick.

Some people complain that concerns about web privacy are overwrought (and sometimes they’re not wrong).  They think that if you need privacy online that means that you’re doing something bad.  But I don’t think that going over my wedding dress options was something bad, and I still would have been bummed if Nick had seen all the photos.