Once again Google has breached millions of peoples’ personal privacy- this time with the launch of it’s new social networking site Buzz.
The launch of the Buzz networking site has backfired badly
On Tuesday Feb 16th Eva Hibnick, a Harvard law student, opened her Gmail account and saw an offer for Buzz, a new service from Gmail’s owner, Google. She wasn’t interested. “I just clicked ‘No, go to my inbox’,” she said. Within hours she and millions of others realised that sometimes no means yes.
Now Hibnick is taking Google to court, and the search giant is left fighting a rearguard action in the latest skirmish over privacy on the internet.
Hibnick, 24, is the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit filed against Google over the launch of Buzz, a social networking service that lets people bring their online connections together to share status updates, videos and photos.
With 146m users, the sheer size of Gmail instantly catapulted Buzz into the top ranks of social networking sites alongside Facebook and Twitter.
As Gmail users were quick to point out, though, they chose to join those networks, while Buzz’s new army was conscripted. The service raided a Gmail user’s contacts book to set up the social network.
The people we contact most frequently are not necessarily those with whom we have the closest relationship. Within hours of the Buzz launch, angry tales were being told of people’s contact details and other information being passed on to the “psychotic” and “abusive ex-husbands”.
Actress Felicia Day, Vi in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, found herself deluged with messages from strangers after posting one message on Buzz. “Buzz things turn up as a message in your inbox? Disabling now. Heart attack,” she wrote. Before Google changed Buzz, some fans would also have been able to see who Day emailed most frequently.
Hibnick and her lawyer claim that information she had a right to consider private had been shared among her Gmail contacts. “I signed up for a private email account, not for a social networking site. They can’t just opt you in,” she said.
“Basically all my email contacts were accessible. Everyone is so shocked that Google would do this.”
Fellow Harvard law student Benjamin Osborn, who is assisting on the case, said the initial problem was that it was not clear what information was being shared and with whom.
Hibnick’s lawyer said Google could face statutory damages of $1,000 per occurrence — a potentially huge sum given Gmail’s size. But he added that the real aim was to force Google to put better checks and balances in place over privacy.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center, the watchdog based in Washington DC, has now asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether consumers were harmed and has asked the commission to demand that Google ask Gmail users to sign up for Buzz instead of enrolling them automatically.
Google moved swiftly to contain the crisis last week, dropping the automatic sign-up and offering clearer instructions on how to opt out of the service and keep messages private.
“We made some mistakes and we accept that,” said Peter Barron, Google’s head of communications. “But if you look at the way we responded, I hope people will see that we reacted quickly to those criticisms and made significant improvements.
“These days everyone leaves a data trail, whether it’s from shopping online, using your mobile phone or doing a search. When you use a credit card you are exposing far more about yourself than in an online search but people generally trust credit-card companies not to misuse their data. At Google, users’ trust is all we have. We take privacy very seriously and build privacy features into all our products based on the principles of transparency, choice and user control.
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October 06, 2009
By: Dr Search- Principal Consultant at the Search Clinic
Category: Uncategorized
IBM is trying to stymie Google’s expansion into the business software market.
IBM is now selling a bare bones email service to companies for $36 (£23) annually per worker, undercutting a more comprehensive package of software applications that Google sells for $50 (£31) per user annually.
For that slightly higher price, Google is offering 25 times more storage: 25 gigabytes per account compared to IBM’s 1 gigabyte per mailbox.
Google also throws in word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications, as well as a video channel. None of those features are included in IBM’s package.
Even so, IBM believes its service, called LotusLive iNotes, can beat Google because it has a much larger sales force and relationships with corporate customers going back long before Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were even born in 1973.
IBM is responding to the increasing corporate demand for inexpensive email that’s run on computers owned by an external supplier instead of the company relying on the service. This approach has become trendy enough to get its own catch phrase – “cloud computing.”
Google has emerged as one of cloud computing’s chief boosters as it tries to generate more revenue from sources besides its dominant internet search engine, which serves as the hub of the web’s most profitable advertising network.
After finding little initial success when it began peddling corporate email in early 2007, Google’s sales pitch has been resonating with more companies looking for ways to save money.
Other email providers also are making inroads with similar discount services, so much so that the technology research firm Gartner predicts about 20 per cent of US companies will run at least some of their email through web browsers by 2012.
Without providing specifics, Google says its corporate users now number in the “hundreds of thousands.” Some companies, including Fairchild Semiconductor International, switched from IBM’s premium email service that costs substantially more than web-based email.
Now, IBM is counter-punching. IBM thinks the timing for its email alternative is ideal, given that Google’s service suffered a highly publicised outage that locked out corporate customers for nearly two hours last month.
“Candidly, Google has shown itself to be weak” in some areas of email, said Sean Poulley, an IBM executive overseeing the company’s email service.
“There is a world of difference between supporting a consumer-grade service and a business-grade service.”
Dave Girouard, who oversees Google’s email and other services tailored for companies, responded that Google will learn the ins and outs of selling software to businesses more quickly than IBM will adapt to cloud computing.
He said Google isn’t planning to lower its prices.
What’s more, IBM probably will face some of the same financial conflicts confronting any long-established vendor trying to cater to a new, less expensive niche in its market.
IBM and other rivals, such as Microsoft, stand to make more money selling more sophisticated email services and software applications that are installed in the computers maintained by the customers.
That means IBM runs the risk of making less money if most of its customers switch to the newer approach, with email hosted off their premises.
But by keeping the storage limits relatively low and skimping on other email features, IBM has narrowed the field of businesses likely to buy the service.
IBM expects the customers to include small and medium-sized businesses, or larger companies whose employees who aren’t tethered to an office desk.
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October 02, 2009
By: Dr Search- Principal Consultant at the Search Clinic
Category: Uncategorized
Google Wave, which combines email, instant messaging and wiki style editing went on public trial on Wednesdsay.
The search giant hopes the tool, described as “how e-mail would look if it were invented today”, will transform how people communicate online.
It will be open to 100,000 invitees from 1600BST, each of whom can nominate five further people to “join the Wave”.
The tool is also open source, meaning third party developers can use the code to build new applications.
The developer behind Wave described it as “a communication and collaboration tool”.
“It struck us that e-mail is still the main communication tool on the web, which seemed remarkable given that it is 20-year-old technology,” said Lars Rasmussen, who, alongside his brother Jens, was the brains behind Google Maps.
In designing Wave, the brothers took as a starting point the idea of “a conversation sitting in a cloud”.
This means people can see a comment being written character by character and can formulate their answer to a question before a fellow ‘Waver’ has even finished asking it.
Mr Rasmussen acknowledges that this feature could be annoying, but thinks it is also a great time-saver.
For those unsure whether they want all their Wave friends to see exactly what they are writing, when they are writing it, the developers are working on a draft mode which will allow the real-time aspect to be switched off .
Unlike traditional instant messenger (IM) conversations continue even once everyone has logged out. This means that those invited to a Wave conversation but not currently online, can read the message strand in full at a later date.
Sharing photos
More radical is the inclusion of wiki-style editing tools.
All messages can be edited at any point by members of the conversation and a Playback facility allows everyone to see exactly who has edited what and at what time.
Google, a famously collaborative firm, now writes all its design documents in Wave.
Wave also makes it very easy to share photos, which can simply be dragged from the desktop onto the Wave platform.
“If you are planning a trip. you can talk about it and plan it in Wave and then share all the photos at the end,” said product manager Stephanie Hannon.
Google Wave runs in most browsers, with the notable exception of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE). Users of IE will have to download a plug-in, known as Chrome Frame to use the application.
Microsoft does not recommend installing this plug-in, claiming it compromises security.
As IE is still the dominant browser, its incompatibility with Wave could affect take-up of the platform.
Google insists the failure of Wave in IE is not an excuse to promote its own browser, Chrome. It said the developers worked “very hard” at trying to make it work in IE.
Much of the code for Wave is written in HTML 5, the next-generation of web language.
In a nod to social-networking site Facebook, there are already a host of applications for Wave, including Sudoku and Chess.
“We are now trying to persuade someone to build a crossword puzzle,” said Mr Rasmussen.
He acknowledges that the success of the platform will depend on how many people are willing to join.
“Without other people adopting Wave it will never take off,” he said.
“I have been accused of being pathologically optimistic about it but I can’t see why people wouldn’t want it,” he said.
His enthusiasm seems to be being borne out to a certain degree. Since Wave was announced at a Google developers’ conference in May, one million people have registered interested.
Wave will have a full consumer launch early next year.
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Google has confirmed that it will no longer be developing Google Wave following disappointing take-up among users
