Google is apologising after criticism that Buzz invades user privacy – but there are some important lessons to learn

It’s been a torrid week for Google Buzz, the activity stream system that was added to Gmail but has since been heavily criticised for invading people’s privacy. While the company’s chief, Eric Schmidt, tries to woo the phone industry at Mobile World Congress, the Buzz team have been scrabbling to get back on the front foot.

Over the weekend the company made a number of tweaks and now product manager Todd Jackson has been put around a number of news outlets to give a public mea culpa – and suggest that more changes are forthcoming.

Millions of users were “rightfully upset”, he told the BBC, adding that the company is “very, very sorry… we know we need to improve things”.

Still, it’s not giving up all the ground.

“Getting feedback from 20,000 Googlers isn’t quite the same as letting Gmail users play with buzz in the wild,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “We needed to launch to the public and get feedback from users.”

Here’s what we know:

- A number of iterations and tweaks have already taken place, and Google plans another set of tune-ups, as early as this week.

- Problems they have acknowledged revolve around 1) exposure of personal information, 2) being unable to see information that’s relevant or important, 3) being swamped by updates and 4) what happens for people who decide to opt out altogether.

- Buzz was tested internally by thousands of Google staff, but the company did not run tests outside the company (as it has with some other products). It plans to move outside its own walls for future product tests.

From where I’m standing, there are two separate but related issues here – one about the product, another about the process.

For the product, some of the issues are pretty straightforward tweaks that you would hope get better over time (such as surfacing good information to users). Many of the others are slight tweaks or power user stuff, like the way the system prioritises heavy users, or the noisiness – lots of elements described by Robert Scoble, who was a heavy user of FriendFeed (which is very similar to Buzz).

All these are fixable as the product develops. Little problems may turn people off in the short term, but they don’t kill it. I think it’s a little unfair to expect great products first time around, and people should be glad that Google is adapting the product through real-world usage (though the fact the company didn’t label this a beta test has also worked against it).

But the second issue is one that it’s going to find a lot harder to deal with, and that’s how Google’s processes ended up getting it to this point.

The company hasn’t always tested on a purely internal basis, but it did in this case. However, it seems to have taken it by surprise to discover that 20,000 engineers and sales people – all entrenched in the technology industry – do not have the same concerns and interests as 150m email users.

On top of that, of course, there’s also the realisation that when you’re inside the firewall there are far fewer of those tricky human issues that the Googlebots missed… the abusive ex-husbands, the cheating girlfriends, the anonymous emailers and so on.

One important thing Google needs to learn here is that while your email contacts are a social network, the people it covers are not the same as the circles on Facebook, Flickr or elsewhere. And just because you want to share your photos with friends or family, you don’t want to share them with your work colleagues or other email contacts.

And they should make the “off” switch easier to find. If you’re going to encourage people to share information about themselves, let them know precisely what that information is and how it will be shared, and how it can be made private again – not hide things behind layers of confusing and unintuitive menus. Facebook did a similar thing with its privacy settings recently – adding complexity and obscurity, while changing the default settings to expose more public information.

Ultimately, Google must realise that it has reached its Microsoft moment (as described last summer by Anil Dash). What is good for it isn’t necessarily good for everybody, despite what the people inside the Googleplex may think.

Using and testing your own products – also known as eating your own dog food is something plenty of technology companies do.

But at the end of the day, dog food is still dog food.

Related posts

• Twitter plans to kill off Suggested User List – and get onto Bing (0)
• Privacy group files FTC complaint against Google Buzz (0)
• Overview of Google Wave (0)
• Facebook gets new privacy settings – and 350 million users (0)
• Breakfast briefing: Mobile World Congress rolls on but Schmidt digs in (0)