[LINK] Google beta clearout, and privacy pretence

[Roger Clarke]

[Google vice president of product, Bradley Horowitz:
["We learned privacy is not a feature...
["It is foundational to the product. And this awareness gave us the 
resolve to design privacy in from the very beginning, which led to 
Circles for sharing the right information with the right people, as 
well as transparency around which parts of your profile can be seen 
by whom."

[But to to get from 'talking the talk' to 'walking the talk', he has to:
-   convince Eric 'get over it' Schmidt, who's his Chairman
-   upturn the logic of social networking schemes, which are based on
     self-exposure stimulating voyeurism
-   upturn his company's business model, which is based on the capture
     and exploitation of personal data]


Failed Buzz to fall off Google+

By Liam Tung
Oct 17, 2011 6:45 AM (1 hour ago)
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/276910,failed-buzz-to-fall-off-google.aspx

Google has announced its intention to drop Buzz, the failed social 
predecessor to Google+.

The product launched in 2010 within Gmail but soon caught the 
attention of the US Federal Trade Commission over initially making 
Buzz users' address books automatically visible to others. 

As with explanations for several other product closures in the past 
year, Google said will focus on its newest social network Google+, 
which CEO Larry Page last week claimed had attracted over 40 million 
users since its launch. 

"We learned a lot from products like Buzz, and are putting that 
learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google+," 
said Google vice president of product, Bradley Horowitz. 

"We learned privacy is not a feature..." Horowitz added on his 
personal Google+ account.

"It is foundational to the product. And this awareness gave us the 
resolve to design privacy in from the very beginning, which led to 
Circles for sharing the right information with the right people, as 
well as transparency around which parts of your profile can be seen 
by whom."

The Google Labs page, given the death sentence in July, as of Friday 
redirected users to the Google home page. 

Other products swept out in the latest cleanup round include open 
source code scouring tool Code Search, social product Jaiku, iGoogle 
social features and API access to Google search for selected 
researchers.

This year Google has also taken down Google Health, Power Meter and 
Google Toolbar in Firefox amongst others.


-- 
Roger Clarke                                 http://www.rogerclarke.com/
			            
Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd      78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
                    Tel: +61 2 6288 1472, and 6288 6916
mailto:Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au                http://www.xamax.com.au/

Visiting Professor in the Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre      Uni of NSW
Visiting Professor in Computer Science    Australian National University