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Does the Social Web need a Googopoly?
https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/does-the-social-web-need-a-googopoly
<b>While the utility of the new social tool Buzz is still under question, the bold move into social space taken last week by the Google Buzz team has Gmail users questioning privacy implications of the new feature. In this post, I posit that Buzz highlights two privacy challenges of the social web. First, the application has sidestepped the consensual and contextual qualities desirable of social spaces. Secondly, Google’s move highlights the increasingly competitive and convergent nature of the social media landscape. </b>
<p></p>
<p>Last week, and for many a surprise, Google launched its new
social networking platform, Buzz. The
new service is Google’s effort to amplify the “social nature” of their services
by integrating them under one platform, and adding some extra social utility. The social application runs from the Gmail
interface, but also links other Google accounts a user may have, including
albums on Picasa, and Google Reader. The service also allows for the sharing from
external sources, such as photos on Flickr, and videos from YouTube. The service also allows users to post, like,
or dislike the status updates of others which may be publicly searchable if the
user opts. Before a Gmail user may fully
participate in Google Buzz service, a unique Google Personal Profile must be
created. </p>
<p><strong>User Consent</strong></p>
<p>Much of the buzz surrounding the new social networking
service last week wasn’t paying much lip service to the new application. Instead, an uproar of privacy concerns continued
to dominate the Buzz scene, with many critics quickly labeling Buzz a “<a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-31322_3-10451428-256.html">privacy nightmare</a>”. A <a href="http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20100216/epic-files-ftc-complaint-over-google-buzz/?mod=ATD_rss">formal
complaint</a> has been already filed with the US Federal Trade Commission in
response to Google’s new privacy violating service. A
second-year Harvard Law student has also filed a <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/google-buzz-draws-class-action-suit-harvard-student/story?id=9875095&page=1">class-action
suit</a> against the company for its privacy malpractices. </p>
<p>Much of the privacy talk thus far has focused on issues of
consent, or lack thereof, in this case. Upon
Buzz’s launch, Gmail users were automatically subscribed as “opting in” for the
service. Google has used the private
address books of millions of Gmail accounts to build social networks from the
contacts users email and chat with most.
To entice users into using the service, Gmail users were set to
auto-follow all of their contacts, and in turn, to be followed by them,
too. Furthermore, all new Buzz users had
been set to automatically share all public Picasa albums and Google Reader items
with their new social graph. It is
argued that social network services should be <a href="http://jonoscript.wordpress.com/2010/02/20/buzz-off-google-social-networks-should-always-be-opt-in-not-opt-out/">opt-in,
rather than opt-out</a>, and that Buzz has violated the consensual nature of
the social web. </p>
<p>Illuminating the complications of building a social graph
from ones inbox is the story of an Australian women, who remains anonymous. As she claims, most of the emails currently received
through her Gmail account, are those from her abusive ex-boyfriend. Due to Google’s assumption that Gmail users
would like to be “auto-followed” by their Gmail contacts (mirroring Twitters friendship
protocol), items shared between herself and new boyfriend through her Google
reader account had become public to her broader social graph, including her
ex-boyfriend and his harassing friends.</p>
<p>In a <a href="http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2010/02/fck-you-google/">blog response</a>
directed to Google’s Buzz team, the woman scornfully wrote- “<em>F*ck you, Google. My privacy concerns are
not trite. They are linked to my actual physical safety, and I will now have to
spend the next few days maintaining that safety by continually knocking down
followers as they pop up. A few days is how long I expect it will take before
you either knock this shit off, or I delete every Google account I have ever
had and use Bing out of f*cking spite</em>”.
As this case demonstrates, the people we mail most often may not be our
closest friends. As email has replaced
the telephone for many as the dominate mode of communication--some contacts may
be friends, however, many others may not be. </p>
<p>In response to the uproar, tweaks to Buzz’s privacy features
have since been made. Todd Jackson,
Buzz’s product manager, has also posted a <a href="http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/millions-of-buzz-users-and-improvements.html">public
apology</a> to the official Gmail Blog late last week for not “getting
everything quite right”. The service will
now assume the more user-centric “auto-suggest” model, allowing users to selectively
choose the contacts they wish to follow, and will also no longer auto-link Picasa
and Reader content. However, as the <a href="http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20100216/epic-files-ftc-complaint-over-google-buzz/?mod=ATD_rss">EPIC’s
complaint notes</a>, many are still unsatisfied with the opt-out nature of the
service, arguing that users should be able to opt-into the service if they so
choose, rather than having to delist themselves for a service they didn’t necessarily
sign up. Ethical quandaries also still
loom over Google’s misuse of the users’ private contact lists to jumpstart
their new service. </p>
<p><strong>Contextual Integrity </strong></p>
<p>The attacks on personal privacy resulting from Google’s model
are vast. As the case of the Australian
woman illuminates, the concept of the “online friend” has completely taken out
of context with Buzz’s initial auto-follow model. Many of the contacts we make on a daily basis
need not be made public through the Google profile. For most, this Buzz’s privacy breach may be
benign or annoying at most. However, those who are engaged in sensitive social
or political relationships via their Gmail chat or email accounts, the revelation
of common contact could have been potentially damaging for many. A reporter from CNET has cleverly labeled
Buzz’ as a “<a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10451703-2.html">socially
awkward networking</a>”, as bringing diverse contacts under one umbrella
doesn’t exactly make the most social sense. In response, Gmail users are
required to sort through and filter their Buzz followers according, or choose
to disable the service all together.</p>
<p>Besides questions of who is stalking whom, the assumptive
and public nature of Google’s new move
has cast a shadow of doubt among Gmail users regarding the ability of Google to
maintain the privacy and contextual integrity of the Gmail account. Should one account be the place to socialize,
and “do business”? Gmail is, and should remain, an email
service. However, Buzz takes the email
experience into new and questionable grounds.
Do Gmail users feel entirely comfortable having their personal email,
social graph, and chat functions all coming under the auspices of one platform?
Many users felt they had been lured
into using a social networking service that they didn’t sign up for in the
first place. </p>
<p><strong>Social Media Competition</strong></p>
<p>In addition to Google’s attempt to integrate their various
service offerings, Buzz is seen as an obvious attempt to bolster
competitiveness in the social media market.
In 2004, Google released Orkut. While the service has become big in
countries such as Brazil and India, it has been overshadowed by sites such as
Facebook in other jurisdictions, and has not been able to prove itself as a mainstream
space for networking. In the past year, Google
had also launched Google Wave, a tool that mixes e-mail, with instant messaging
and the ability for several people to collaborate on documents. However, the application failed to completely
win over audiences, and was considered one of the <a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_10_failures_of_2009.php">top
failures of 2009</a>. </p>
<p>With Google unable to effectively saturate the social media
ecosystem, Buzz is an attempt to compete with the searchable and real time
experiences provided by social media giants, Facebook and Twitter. Increased competition within the social media
market could be a positive development for privacy, as social media companies
could arguably be compete on their ability to provide users with preferable privacy
architectures. To the contrary, however,
such competition has thus far had negative ramifications for user privacy, as
the recent Buzz and Facebook moves illustrates.
Facebook’s loosened privacy settings were a <a href="http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15350984">competitive
knee-jerk</a> to Twitters searchable and real time experience. Through a Twitter search, individuals can
come to know what people are saying about a certain topic, event, or product,
and as a result, the service has received a great deal attention from users,
and non-users such as advertisers, alike.
</p>
<p>In an attempt to one-up, their competition, the “Twitterization”
of Facebook followed in two distinct stages.
First was with the implementation of the Facebook News Feed, which gave
users a real time account of actions their friends on the site. Many argued that this feature invaded user
privacy. However, it was argued by
Facebook that they only were making available information that was already
accessible through individual profile pages.
The News Feed, as it happens, effectively took user information and
actions on the site out of original context by streaming this information live
for others easy viewing. Information
users once had to rummage for had become accessible in real time on the
homepage of the service. </p>
<p>Secondly, Facebooks’ recent <a href="http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/facebooks-new-privacy-changes-good-bad-and-ugly">privacy
scandal</a> was a step towards making profile information more searchable and accessible
to third parties, as is most often the case with the more public feeds on Twitter. As <a href="https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/•%09http:/www.simplyzesty.com/twitter/unrelenting-twitterization-facebook-continues/">one
commentator notes</a>, “<em>Facebook used to be very private but private
is not great for search, to have great search you need all of the data to be
publicly available as it mostly is on Twitter. Facebook have not quite nailed
real time search yet but they are getting there and it will soon be a great way
of examining sentiment across different demographics</em>”. As a result, information on Facebook, such as
name, profile picture, friends list, location and fan pages have become open
access information. In addition, users
on Facebook have been subjected to new privacy regime without notice, leaving
their profile pages generally more open, and searchable through Google. </p>
<p><strong>Converging the Online
Self</strong></p>
<p>The impact Buzz alone can make on the social media landscape
remains questionable (Gmail heralds only 140 million accounts, which is a deficient
cry from Facebooks’ 400+ million dedicated users). However, despite Googles’ in/ability to
become claim hegemony over the social web landscape, the abuse of private information
to launch a new service has raised serious debate over the privacy and the
future of social networking. The Buzz
service marks more than yet another new social networking service that brushes
aside the privacy of users. As user control
and privacy becomes an increasingly peripheral concern, Google’s shift toward privacy
decontrol also signifies a worrisome supply-side shift towards the
“convergence” of online identity.</p>
<p>Within this new dominant paradigm, privacy concerns are
often interpreted as antithetical to competitiveness in the social media
marketplace. Instead of an imagined ecosystem
based on user control and privacy preference, it can now be inferred that the
competiveness of social networking services will continue to disrupt the
delicate balance between the public and private online. Regardless that greater
visibility and searchability of the social profile may not be in the public
interest, Google’s recent move works to reinforcement of the new status quo of
“openness”. Furthermore, it is
questionable as to how concentrated and integrated a user may want their online
activities to become. A critical
discourse of online privacy must, therefore, take into account the ways in
which the social web has renders the user increasingly transparent through networks
of networking services. </p>
<p>Google’s Buzz illustrates this point quite well. Initially, Gmail was a straightforward email
service. Next, the AdWords advertising service
and Gmail chat had become integrated into the Gmail experience. Because Google was using the confidential
emails of its Gmail users, privacy concerns began to mount upon the launch of
the the AdWords service. However,
turmoil surrounding AdWords died down, notably as Google continues to reassert
that is is bots, not humans, that are scanning the emails in order to provide
the AdWords service. Next, there gradually
occurred a convergence of Google services under the single social profile, or
“email address”. A single Gmail account
potentially includes use of with Google reader, calendar, chat, groups and an Orkut
account. In terms of behavioral targeted
advertising, Google has recently announced that they will be providing
personalized search results even to users who have not signed up for Google
services. This will be done through the
placement a cookie on all machines to provide targeted advertising seamlessly
through each Google search and browsing session. </p>
<p>While many argue that the collection of non-personally
identifiable information poses no privacy harm, this assumption needs
reassessment. As Google comes to offer
us more, they also come to learn more, and Buzz signifies this trend towards a Googopolized
social web. To add another layer of
complexity to Googles hegemony, users of the Buzz service are also required to create
a “Google Profile”, which is searchable online and displays real time status
updates, comments, and connections from other social network services, such as
Facebook and Twitter. As Google recently
launched the beta version of the new <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/introducing-google-social-search-i.html">Social
Search</a>, Buzz was just the service required to increase the relevance to the
new service by encouraging Gmail users to publish even more personal
information. The creation of a personal
Google profile, which is indexed and searchable, raises many concerns about
privacy and identity, and doubts are continually raised over <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/hey-google-thi-i-why-privacy-matter-2010-2">how
much Google should come to know</a> about us.</p>
<p>While Google’s services have arguably made the online social
experience more seamless and tailored, it is questionable as to how relevant,
or even desirable, such a shift may be.
At present, it may appear that Google is wearing far too many hats, and
users should be wary of placing all eggs into one basket. As
the launch of Buzz has shown us, user consent and the contextual integrity of
private personal information can be compromised when a diverse number of online
services are integrated and given a social spin. When competition among social web providers
drives users to lose control of the private information which is inherently theirs,
critical questions surrounding competition, convergence and privacy require
critical exploration. </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/does-the-social-web-need-a-googopoly'>https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/does-the-social-web-need-a-googopoly</a>
</p>
No publisherrebeccaPrivacySocial NetworkingCompetitionGoogle Buzz2011-08-18T05:06:37ZBlog Entry