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After several hours of playing with Google Buzz and doing research on my previous posts What is Google Buzz and How to Manually Install Google Buzz Submit Buttons, I came across several articles stating that Google Buzz has a privacy flaw. The flaw is that Google Buzz automatically sets you with followers and people to follow. Google told Business Insider that the followers are chosen by how often a contact email is used or how often the user chats with that person using Gmail.
This feature is great and can help a new user get started but, but by default the people you follow and your followers are made public to anyone who looks at your profile. What this means to you and your contacts is, that before you have the chance to change these settings someone can view your profile and your contacts that you most often email and chat with. By Default this option should be set to private. Hopefully Google will see the light and fix this.
If this has you worried, there is a quick and easy fix for this. In your
- In the top right corner look for to links that says something like; username has x followers and username has x followers. Should say it is only visible to you.
But if it says it public you will need to change that.
Gmail Profile Account; - If you need to make a change to these settings, click on the edit profile link off to right of where the About Me, Buzz, and Contact Info links are.
- There will be three columns at the top of the page where you can make changes to your profile. In the third column you will find the option to turn off “Display the list of people I’m following and people following me”.
- Uncheck that box. Once you remove the check box, then this should set your contacts to private.
I am not sure if it is totally private or if only those that those of your followers and those that you follow can see your contacts. Can someone test this for and let me know so I can up this walk through?
About James
How Google could decide itself whom I want to follow and whom not? Yes, technically it is possible for google but should it hijack my right to accept and ignore anybody? Don’t you think google is misusing your privacy data for its commercial benefits?
That's really help lot of our readers to make their contacts private. Even I have applied the same settings.
My recent post Google Buzz Privacy : Easy Steps To Stop Google Buzz From Showing The World Your Contacts
Yeah, I get annoyed when I can a user contacts and see all of their none Buzz users. Luckily none of my Real Life contacts have this issue.
My recent post What is Google Buzz? Why Can’t I Access Buzz on My Account?
Yeah, I get annoyed when I can a user contacts and see all of their none Buzz users. Luckily none of my Real Life contacts have this issue.
My recent post What is Google Buzz? Why Can’t I Access Buzz on My Account?
Wow… google buzz released this week, and now we have the buzz button! its really fast!