On Saturday, the company announced it would change Buzz again, not with regard to profiles (which will apparently continue to be made public, if only to other Buzz users, by default) but rather, followers. As Buzz product manager Todd Jackson wrote, “Starting this week, instead of an auto-follow model in which Buzz automatically sets you up to follow the people you email and chat with most, we’re moving to an auto-suggest model. You won’t be set up to follow anyone until you have reviewed the suggestions and clicked ‘Follow selected people and start using Buzz.'”
Also over the weekend, Google essentially admitted it was not the best of ideas to assume that items already shared through Picasa and Google Reader, on a local basis, should become automatically shared through Buzz; new users were discovering they were already sharing Picasa photos without ever having given their permission. What we have also yet to see next week is whether Buzz users can still make use of a trick that a security engineer discovered last Friday, to use Picasa to ascertain one’s semi-public Google Profile URL as though it were a fully public one.
A Google spokesperson confirmed to Betanews this afternoon that a second round of privacy changes, the nature of which was revealed last Saturday evening, is still being developed, and may yet go live “in the next couple of days.”
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