If you have a GMail account, you may have noticed Google Buzz, their latest attempt at social networking. It rolled out a couple of days ago, and there have already been a couple of security/privacy issues raised:
Sharon Machlis:
If you leave Google Buzz in default mode, it will automatically start following people for you - apparently the people you've e-mailed most often. And, those you follow appear in your public profile. ... unless you proactively change these settings, everyone knows your most valuable contacts.
Google didn't find anyone for me to "follow", probably because I rarely use it to send email. (And most of what I receive there is spam. (And most of that is correctly filtered; good for gmail.))
Barbara Krasnoff:
I saw was a list of public "buzzes" from people in my immediate area. Under each buzz was the person's location - not the general location, but the full address. Street number, street name, city, state.
This was specifically for updates from smart phones, but for consistency why not integrate existing directory-lookup services for fixed IPs?
If you have a GMail account, you may want to check what assumptions Google has made about how you want to be Buzzed.
[This entry was originally posted as
http://syntonic-comma.dreamwidth.org/320117.html on Dreamwidth (where there are
comments).]