[Air-L] Privacy Buzz

[Christian Fuchs]

I think Buzz is an interesting new phenomenon.

I find interesting about the NY Times article and the reactions of some 
users to Buzz that they primarily stress the danger that China, Iran, 
etc could use Buzz for engaging in the (political) surveillance of 
political oppositionists and that they label such endeavaours 
totalitarian, while at the same time they do not provide a critique of 
the economic surveillance machine constituted by Google's expanding 
services, its collection, storage, analysis, and commodification of 
personal data, and its market dominance.

Surveillance and Big brother are not only somewhere out there in China 
or Iran, they are also present in the heart of capitalism itself - in 
the form of economic surveillance, and Google is one of its primary 
executors.

Buzz privacy policy for example says:
"When you use Google Buzz, we may record information about your use of 
the product, such as the posts that you like or comment on and the other 
users who you communicate with. This is to provide you with a better 
experience on Buzz and other Google services and to improve the quality 
of Google services"
"If you use Google Buzz on a mobile device and choose to view "nearby" 
posts, your location will be collected by Google."

The task is to collect as many data about users and to then to sell this 
data as commodity to advertising clients. Google fears the competition 
by Facebook and Twitter in the social networking market, and so has set 
up its own service (although I doubt that I will be so successful 
because until now it only supports rather trivial functions).

To only focus on the political surveillance capabilities that Buzz 
provides for some non-Western societies and to ignore the immanence of 
economic surveillance, is a form od Digital Orientalism that is 
ideologically blind for the forms of stratification that are at the 
heart of Western economies.

Cheers, Christian


> 
> On Feb 13, 2010, at 11:33 AM, Aziz Douai wrote:
> 
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> I guess I am one of the lurkers on the listserv, but here goes my first
>> contribution: Buzz. If you have used the new google social network service,
>> how do you feel about the seeming violation of privacy? A few days ago, I
>> decline my Gmail's insistence on adding trying the new feature/service. Now,
>> the New York Times has a great article (Critics Say Google Invades Privacy
>> with New Service:
>> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/technology/internet/13google.html) on how
>> users' rights to privacy appear to have been violated. The article raises
>> the interesting question of how totalitarian regimes may use the service to
>> suppress political dissent. Google's rhetoric and carefully constructed
>> image following its row with China is put to test.
>>
>> Anyway, I am curious as to how AIR members have found the feature with
>> regard to both privacy and security.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Aziz
>>
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Aziz Douai, Ph.D.
>> Assistant Professor, Communication Program
>> Faculty of Criminology, Justice and Policy Studies
>> University of Ontario Institute of Technology
>> 2000 Simcoe Street North
>> Oshawa, ON L1H 7K4
>> E-mail: aziz.douai at uoit.ca/ azizdouai at gmail.com
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> "A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring
>> it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both."  James
>> Madison, 1822
>>
>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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> 
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-- 
- - -
Priv.-Doz. Dr. Christian Fuchs
Associate Professor
Unified Theory of Information Research Group
ICT&S Center
University of Salzburg
Sigmund Haffner Gasse 18
5020 Salzburg
Austria
christian.fuchs at sbg.ac.at
Phone +43 662 8044 4823
Personal Website: http://fuchs.uti.at
Research Group: http;//www.uti.at
Editor of
tripleC - Cognition, Communication, Co-Operation | Open Access Journal 
for a Global Sustainable Information Society
http://www.triple-c.at
Fuchs, Christian. 2008. Internet and Society: Social Theory in the 
Information Age. New York: Routledge.
http://fuchs.uti.at/?page_id=40