If, like millions of others, you use Gmail, Google’s webmail service, you will have been startled last week by the sudden appearance of a cuckoo in your email nest. When you log in to collect your mail, an invitation to “try Buzz in Gmail?” — “no setup needed” — pops up. There’s no indication of what this “Buzz” is, but if you click “try” a window opens saying you’re now “following” a number of people and that a number of people are “following” you. Below this comes a stream of Twitter-like postings from your followees.
This will come as a surprise, because you have no recollection of making any decision to follow anyone, or of soliciting followers yourself. And this is in fact the case: Google has simply gone through your email inbox and designated some of those with whom you correspond frequently as followees. And you were at no stage consulted about any of this.
Google Buzz is a new social-networking tool developed by the search giant and designed to undermine Twitter and Facebook. It’s breathtakingly crass and intrusive and takes astonishing liberties with your privacy, of which more in a moment. But what’s even more significant is how it was introduced, and what that tells us about Google — which is that it is well on its way to becoming the next Microsoft. In earlier times, Google would have developed Buzz as a “beta” product and offered it as an option on the top of the Gmail menu for those who wished to try it, as they do with the calendar, docs, reader and other services. But with Buzz they simply inserted it into Gmail with only the most enigmatic of warnings, and suddenly users find that, somehow, they’ve been enrolled in Google’s own Twitter/Facebook competitor.
Privacy implications
If this doesn’t seem like a big deal, think about the privacy implications. By default the list of those you are following (by implication those with whom you are in regular contact) is publicly available in your Google profile to everyone who visits it. And this information itself comes with helpful “follow” links, which provides a way of harvesting the contact lists of other people. You can hide the list of unsolicited followers/followees from your profile page, but to do so you have to click “edit profile” and uncheck the box next to “display the list of people I’m following and people following me”. However, this option isn’t obvious in the Buzz window itself.
Now think of the implications. Of course it’s potentially embarrassing for people who conduct personal relationships or confidential business via email, but it could also be life-threatening. Suppose you’re a political activist living in an authoritarian country. You use Gmail because it’s slightly less risky than other systems. Many of your Gmail contacts are other activists, inside and outside your country. Under the Buzz defaults, they would suddenly be exposed to anyone who checked your Google profile.
In the real world, the devil is in the details. In cyberspace, it’s in the defaults. And the default settings in Buzz are so crass that one cannot imagine they are the product of corporate carelessness.
Bundling Buzz
The Google boys are smart and know exactly what they’re doing. They’ve been enviously watching the stupendous growth of Twitter and Facebook and wondering how Google can cut them off at the knees before they become really unstoppable — which brings us back to Microsoft.
In 1995, Bill Gates & Co became alarmed by the rise of Netscape, the start-up whose Navigator web browser was taking the world by storm. Microsoft’s own browser, Internet Explorer, was a feeble imitation, so the company decided to attack Netscape not by building a better product, but by integrating Explorer into the Windows operating system, thereby making it the default browser for most computer users. In other words, they “leveraged” their dominance in one market to wipe out Netscape in another.
All of which suggests an interpretation of what Google is up to with Buzz. It’s too late to tackle Twitter or Facebook on their own terms, so the only option is to “leverage” an area where Google is strong.
Gmail is that area, which is why Buzz was bundled into it with so little ceremony. Bill Gates once said that Google was the only company that reminded him of Microsoft in its early days. How right he was.
guardian.co.uk