Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Google Resurrects Google Buzz Public Posts

Google emailed users of its long-forgotten Google Buzz social network last night to tell them their posts are about to be saved to Google Drive, where some of them will be publicly viewable.

HitToon.Com/Shutterstock

What’s weird about this move is Google Buzz was shut down way back in 2011, and users were given tools to save their content at the time.

But now, a year and a half later, Google has come up with a new dead-product archiving scheme for a product that’s already dead. It told users that it’s integrating those old Buzz posts with Google Drive, where they’ll soon see two files: A private snapshot of all their activity, and a version of their public content that will be shown on their Google Profile and indexed in search results.

One further complication: Unless former Buzz users delete all their data now, comments they left on other people’s public posts may be memorialized forever, because those people control their own public files.

After mistakes like exposing users’ private Gmail address books when Google Buzz launched, Google settled with the FTC for 20 years of privacy audits.

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