The Buzz on Google Buzz: David Loftus

I find it hard to sympathize with users who fault a social networking program for making it easier for them to socialize. It sounds to me like Google Buzz has merely been playing catch-up to Facebook, which admittedly has had its share of complaints about upgrades, missteps, and invasions of privacy over the past few years, but has usually been quick to respond and amend. Like Facebook, Google Buzz has offered an out: users may manually disable the feature -- they just have to take the trouble to learn how and do it, which some people find too onerous.

If you’re paying for a service and that service upgrades its features in an attempt to improve itself, then you don’t have much of a leg to stand on with regard to your privacy. Just discontinue the service if you don’t like the improvements: stop paying for it. But people would rather complain. It’s another symptom of a culture of instantaneous response that email and the Internet has enabled people to make (and abuse) without having time to think or cool down.

More and more, I find Americans misunderstanding and misusing the concept of the “right to privacy.” The funniest one has been the protests against automatic cameras at controlled intersections that catch and photograph vehicles running red lights. What sort of “right to privacy” does one have in breaking the law? Prohibitions against unlawful searches inside a vehicle are well established; a person clearly has some privacy rights there. But for the vehicle as a whole? When a car exceeds the speed limit, or rams another car and drives off, or runs a red light, it’s very clear to anyone who’s even 50 feet away what it has done. There’s no invasion of privacy to assert that vehicle and its presumptive driver have broken the law. Yet people have complained that such cameras “invade their privacy.” That’s a radical misinterpretation of the concept.

As for complaints about the new Google networking service? If you don’t like it, Buzz Off.