I had my attention brought to another blog post earlier today (which for the purposes of this post, I shall assume you have read). Initially, my thoughts were that Google had gone and committed a rather large error, but I didn’t look too far into it as it wasn’t going to affect me and really had to set off towards home. When I arrived back I started talking about it to a friend, who immediately put me right. It turns out that Google Buzz is not exposing any new data to anyone without being allowed to. It is in fact aggregating already public data into, in my opinion, a pretty nice format.

What has happened here is a complete misunderstanding. Following the main example from that post (though it’s completely true of other services which Buzz can import from) Google Buzz will only display shared Google Reader items and comments that you publicly share. If these are private, then Google Buzz isn’t going to ruin your day and wave them around publicly.

To top this off, within Buzz there is actually a link (under Connected Sites, select Edit next to the Sharing With column) which takes you straight to the privacy options page, where you can go back and fix your earlier mistake of not correctly choosing your privacy settings. I’d actually say that, far from revealing your private data, Google have done a reasonable job of letting you protect your privacy in this case.

The hype that this has generated is rather saddening, and a reminder that people are all too quick to jump on the bandwagon. The author has posted a follow up, with a bit more explanation and as it turns out, a confirmation from Google of what I have focused on here (though this doesn’t have too much attention brought to it).