Google launched Google Buzz way back on Tuesday, and since then it's been spreading around the Internet with blinding speed. All the blogs now have these "Follow us on Google Buzz!" banners, touting its "Inbox Integration" and adding little "Buzz This!" buttons next to their "Tweet This!" and "Facebook The Hell Out Of This Shit!" buttons.

Very quickly, though, privacy concerns started popping up all over the place. Google Buzz was on by default and tightly integrated with GMail. Google viewed this as a big bonus:

You have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch — it just works. If you think about it, there's always been a big social network underlying Gmail. Buzz brings this network to the surface by automatically setting you up to follow the people you email and chat with the most.

Somehow, it didn't occur to Google that email is a private space, and that not everybody is "friends" with the people they email the most. More importantly, people email their lawyers, confidential sources, exes, doctors, etc. Amazingly, Google didn't think it would be a problem to seed a social network with these contacts.

A scary example of the consequences:

I use my private Gmail account to email my boyfriend and my mother. There's a BIG drop-off between them and my other "most frequent" contacts. You know who my third most frequent contact is. My abusive ex-husband.

Which is why it's SO EXCITING, Google, that you AUTOMATICALLY allowed all my most frequent contacts access to my Reader, including all the comments I've made on Reader items, usually shared with my boyfriend, who I had NO REASON to hide my current location or workplace from, and never did.

The Times goes into more detail about the specific issues and Google's reaction, alternately "it's not a big deal" and "we're working on it." They've addressed some of the issues, but not to many critics' satisfaction.

Google has a history of being tone-deaf to privacy concerns. When they first launched GMail, it didn't have a delete button. They figured with all the storage they were giving you, there would no longer be a reason to ever delete an email. Why not just keep everything? Of course, actual humans delete emails for reasons other than lack of storage—they delete embarrassing emails, incriminating emails, spam, etc. Google didn't think people would mind having a permanent archive of their mail on servers they didn't control with no way to get rid of anything.

Shockingly, this turned out to be wrong.

Google is the biggest media company in the world, and well on its way to becoming one of the biggest companies in the world, period, yet they still see themselves as a benevolent little startup that everyone trusts implicitly. They get a ton of mileage out of their "Don't Be Evil" slogan, and the Google Buzz situation is more evidence of how much they actually believe it.

The problem is that Google applies this slogan internally to their intentions and their plans, and is often blind to the possible results in real world. The founders are so dedicated to changing the world, that they spend little time worrying about whether the world wants to be changed. Google does have good intentions, to a fault.

They release things before they're ready and tinker as they go because that's what they've always done, but they're not able to see that holding so much personal and private information about so many millions of people makes this a very dangerous strategy. Slapping "beta" on a product can no longer absolve them of responsibility anymore than Toyota could have gotten away with calling their braking system a beta.

Google's products have massive and serious real-world implications for millions of people all over the world. Sorry guys, but it's time to grow up.

UPDATE: In the comments, Paul Constant points to a good CNET article on the steps you need to take to get yourself out of Google Buzz.