Google Buzz is leaking information. Yes, it’s true. And if you’re not careful enough, you might end up giving your personal contacts and even emails to the world out there.
You do have a control over your privacy. Or you don’t?
Well, the answer is mixed. The real thing is, Buzz right now is really messy regarding setting privacy options. For instance, you don’t have a control where you show up. Where your comments would be going. At which timeline you’d be showing up. You can’t choose, if you’d be showing up in someone else’s public profile. It doesn’t matter how much secure your profile is. It doesn’t matter how much *private* your profile is. Your comments are bound to be shown in people’s public timeline, whom you’ve followed. So, in a nutshell, you have to rely on their privacy settings, instead of yours.
Is your email safe?
And the answer is mixed. Google borrows the “@reply” feature from twitter. For replying via Google Buzz, you just have to do the things you do in twitter, ditto. But there’s a catch here. Unlike twitter, (which depends on your twitter handle), google auto fills the "”@reply” from your address book.
BUT if you don’t have a public profile, your email address would be there after the @ and your mail id will be exposed. Again, if you’ve not made your public profile and your privacy settings aren’t what they should be, you can be in trouble.
Probably, you don’t want your email to be so social
Do you use your gmail for every possible conversation on the internet? I don’t. And if you’re in my category, you have to set up a public profile and adjust your privacy settings so that people, on whose address list you are, don’t expose your email id to the world. That’s because, you can be a geek, but all the people in your address book may not be. And if they’re not, you may have to pay a price for it.
Turning off Buzz works?
NO. It doesn’t. If you turn off Buzz through your Gmail, it only disappears from your gmail dashboard. Buzz is still there in your profile. All your posts and comments are still there in your profile and you can still comment via the same.
Are all of your contacts shown in your profile?
Yes. Unless you go to your profile settings and check off “Display the list of people I’m following and people following me”.
At last, Buzz is interesting. But you need to be a little bit careful on how to use it to avoid good ups. We don’t know why did Google didn’t rolled out a Beta version of this service when Gmail was beta for so many years and orkut is still, as a matter of fact. Every feature Google rolls out first goes through extensive testing via Gmail Labs. But Buzz simply didn’t. Is Google going mad in the race of getting ahead in social networking wars?
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