Google Buzz: Could have done better

If Google filed a report card on the launch of its new social networking service it would read: "Could have done better."

That is not my assessment but actually that of the people who work on the privacy protocols that were built into Buzz - and in fact every product that Google rolls out.

To recap, Google Buzz was launched on 9 February, inside Gmail, letting users post status updates, share content and read and comment on friends' posts.

The major problem was Google's decision to automatically give users a ready-made circle of friends based on the people they most frequently e-mailed. (My initial post on the service touched on this issue.)

The auto-follow feature has now been changed to auto-suggest following a storm of criticism from users concerned about this list being made public, allowing anyone to see who a user corresponded with most frequently.

The reason I mention Google Buzz in a new post is that two privacy head honchos from the search giant were in San Francisco on what could be termed a serendipitous visit.

Their sit-down with journalists was planned well in advance of Google Buzz going live, and kudos to them that they didn't suddenly find other, more important matters to attend to than talking to reporters.

Hosting the round-table was New York-based managing product counsel Mike Yang - he's part of a team of Google attorneys who consult on privacy, copyright and other issues during product development - and Google's head privacy engineer Alma Whitten, who works in London.

Their visit was ostensibly to walk us through how Google deals with privacy and how hard it works to make transparency and choice an integral part of every Google product.

It didn't take long before we were all asking: "What the heck went wrong with Google Buzz?"

Mr Yang admitted that the "how and the why" are questions they will be poring over for a while to come and that, yes, "the execution could have been better".

Mr Yang echoed what the product manager for Google Buzz Todd Jackson told the BBC last week when he acknowledged that many of the network's "tens of millions" of users were "rightfully upset" and that the firm was "very, very sorry".

"We know we need to improve things," Mr Jackson told BBC News at the time.

"Dogfooding", as explained at this Google blog post, is a term affectionately used to describe a company and its employees using its own product. Mr Yang conceded in this case, the testing - largely dogfooded - wasn't adequate enough. But he stressed that no short-cuts were taken:

"This product went through all those checks and more. It wasn't as if this team managed to evade all the controls. They got all the reviews they were supposed to get.
 
"One of the things learned from this is we never only rely on dogfooding as a testing mechanism. We had been dogfooding it for months and all thought it was cool and useful.
 
"We need to continue to take in better data on how people react to the service."

Google was clearly stung by the reaction from users and privacy groups, even though they had spoken to some organisations ahead of the launch. Mr Yang and Ms Whitton declined to name them.

The privacy watchdog, the Electronic Privacy Information Centre, (Epic) has asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Google on the basis that its new service broke consumer protection law.

Epic maintains that when users signed up for Gmail, they signed up for an e-mail service and not a social networking one.

But Mr Yang pointed out that using e-mail contacts for social networking is what others including Facebook already do.

"E-mail is a good way to start a social graph," noted Mr Yang. "Facebook has been using Gmail contacts forever to find their social graph."

Interestingly, Mr Yang also admitted that when it was building its privacy protocols into Buzz, it looked at the serious mis-steps that Facebook made with Beacon.

In that incident, Beacon was used to track web shopping on partner sites outside Facebook and then sell adverts to the social network based on purchases.

After complaints the site was invading privacy, Facebook changed Beacon from an opt-out system to opt-in.

Mr Yang was not quite as loquacious on the subject of what exactly they gleaned from this case but admitted that they "learned to stay consistent with users expectations".

One lesson they clearly took on board was that when faced with a storm of criticism, hold your hands up, accept you screwed up, apologise and then fix it lickety-split.

Facebook took about a month to apologise for Beacon and make changes. It was eventually shut down in September last year.

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