This is my unhappy ‘Buzz’

Google’s social networking tool, ‘Buzz’ caught most of our attention in the last few days. I only got around to click ‘Buzz’ yesterday. Driven by a curiosity (for research mostly), with one single click, ‘Buzz’ was embedded in my Google email account. That is all what I can remember. I found two followers, among these two, there was a friend who was very unlikely person to sign up for any social networking site, never mind following me! In speaking with him, it was confirmed that nothing was intentional and did not even realise what had happened. It seemed that by clicking ‘Buzz’, it automatically created a network of friends (as reported by BBC news today) and sent off follower messages to people in our email address list.

The next thing I did was to stop ‘Buzz’ and signed off. Personally, I am very disappointed by ‘Buzz’ for assuming who should be in my network of friends and then would initiate creating 'my network' by sending out follower messages to people. The concerning aspect of the workings of ‘Buzz’ is in its underlying assumption that our data belongs to them. Google appears to be claiming the ownership of my data. In doing so, it is challenging the boundary of private and public sphere.

We witness the changes in the notion and perception of privacy with the emergence of various social networking tools. However, it should be noted that the decision to publish what has been previously considered to be private in a public sphere is being made by us, the users. The social networking tools are certainly providing tools and the mechanism to facilitate a change to the concept of privacy. However, it is users who should have power to act as their own gatekeeper for online social network to become buzzing.