Screw You, Google
The fuck has officially been downgraded.
I had a big long post planned for you guys. Ohhhh, it was full of vitriol. It was also full of more information on exactly what happened between me and Buzz, because I got sick of repeating myself in the comments to well-meaning people who kept asking, “Couldn’t you just turn Buzz off?” It also had some general information about how it so happened that after an abusive marriage, I didn’t stop emailing my abuser right away (the answer is FEAR) and how he became a frequent contact (the answer is EMAILING ME TEN TIMES A DAY FOR MONTHS THAT FELT LIKE ETERNITY). I didn’t want to offer any of this up in defense of myself, because I do not think I have anything to defend. But one of the main purposes of this blog, for me, has been to share information about what an abusive relationship actually looks like, how it operates, common misunderstandings, etc. Now that so much of our communication and social interaction has been downloaded to the internet, abuse has a whole new forum in which to operate (and generate further misunderstandings and stereotypes and insults, such as “If you were really abused, you wouldn’t even be on the internet”, and yes, that’s an actual deleted comment) and I think it’s useful to bring attention to this big hidden world of abuse victims who still somehow, miraculously, have access to computers and use them sometimes for the things non-abuse victims (and abusers) use them for. I think that’s still an interesting conversation to have, and would maybe like to hear from you in the comments if you have some experience with navigating abuse and the use of technology.
But! Time moves awfully fast on the Internet. Today I was contacted by Nick Saint of Business Insider, who wanted to know if I would mind having my blog excerpted on an article he was writing about Buzz. I consider everything I write here to be public domain – it wouldn’t be on a public blog if I wanted to keep it private – so have a very permissive policy on having my writing reproduced elsewhere. Like I said, I have a partial motivation to help educate people on the Shit What Nobody Likes To Talk About, and I think that happens quicker and much more organically if I don’t put any stops on my blog getting around. Though it does cause headaches – I am not looking forward to moderating my comments the next week or so.
Anyway, Nick wrote his article. His article and other similar articles that had popped up started getting disseminated around the internet, and lo and behold, I get an email from Todd Jackson, product manager of Buzz. Todd started off by apologizing and assuring me that he was taking this very seriously. He said he would get back to me when he’d routed out the problems. Though the teeth-gnashing part of me still feels like I should have given him what-for, the rest of me knows he already got it; this article did what the internet is best at and made the rounds in a fast and scary way. I’m sure having Google’s corporate name, credentials, and brand next to the concept of “Putting Abuse Victims In Danger” was what-for enough. And while somebody at Google should have considered these privacy holes before launching Buzz, and while nobody at Google should have made Buzz automatic for all Gmail users (for which I might still leave Gmail), I can say I’m 100% certain that nobody at Google had any kind of intention to put anybody in danger. This was reckless, but not malevolent. Still, intentions don’t matter a whole lot when you put somebody in fear for their safety, which is why I still get riled up and want to go back and yell at Todd, but it’s more important to me to have him working on the problems than being reduced to tears because it somehow makes me feel better.
ANYWAY. Todd got back to me with two new privacy features, and some useful info for navigating Buzz, reproduced here for everybody else who is concerned about their accounts:
We took a closer look at the issues you reported and want to explain a few things as well as thank you for helping us discover two issues. We’re sorry that the product experience was extremely confusing, and we’re taking steps to fix it.
First, just to be clear: if your Reader shared items are “Protected,” no one except the people you’ve explicitly allowed to see your shared items have been able to see them. If your Reader shared items are public on the web, then they are discoverable by anyone. To make sure your Reader shared items are protected, visit .
You can block any unwanted followers in Google Buzz, regardless of whether or not you (or they) have a profile. This is one of the changes we made last night in response to feedback we’d received from others. Click the Buzz link in Gmail, click on “XX followers,” and then block them.
Your report helped us discover one bug and one product issue in Google Reader.
1) People you block in Buzz still appear as following you in Reader
If you block people in Buzz, they are still showing up as following you in Reader. This is a bug, and we’re working to fix it. Provided that your shared items are protected, only the people you’ve explicitly allowed to see them can do so — regardless of who appears to be following you in Reader.2) No ability to block people from Reader
Until now, there has not been functionality to block people from following you in Google Reader. We’re adding this to the Reader interface.We are making these two changes as fast as possible (we’re working the code changes now), and we’ll get them live in the next few days.
Lastly, it sounds like you don’t want to use Google Buzz or have any kind of public profile. To make sure you’ve turned Buzz off completely, please .
If any other areas of Reader or Buzz have issues like this, please let us know (feel free to send screenshots), and we’ll look into making further improvements. Again, we really appreciate your fast feedback.
So! There are still a lot of issues with Buzz, and beyond all the bugs, there’s still the fact that they opted me into it without my permission – in fact, explicitly against my permission. That’s not something I’m going to forgive or forget, and there’s still a broken trust that makes me hairy eyeball even the nicest thing Todd can say to me. But, according to Todd, I do not have to be concerned that my abusive ex-husband had access to messages I attached to shared items in my Reader. I have a lot of other “that’s a crappy way to run a program, Google!” kind of problems, but that’s all something for me to gripe over with friends while I research other email services. My biggest and most frantic concern was my physical safety, and I can now apparently lay that one to rest. For that, I’m very thankful that Todd took this issue seriously and corrected it quickly, and I’m thankful to Nick Saint and all the other people out there who blew this story up.
Now for some boring blog stuff:
I AM GOING TO BE SO SWAMPED WITH COMMENTS GUYS. If your shit isn’t getting through quickly, it’s because I’m not moving quickly, because this is all sorts of ruining my Valentine’s Day weekend. If your comment really doesn’t seem to come through quickly, or at all, it’s one of three things:
- Your comment requires some additional effort somehow – there are some comments that I want to respond to as soon as they appear publically, and if I don’t have the time to write a response, the comment doesn’t go through yet.
- Your comment requires some additional effort somehow, part 2 – if you have a story for one of the lists, that requires me opening up a WHOLE NOTHER WINDOW, and ugh. Sometimes I am just that irritable.
- You are well-intentioned but have no reading comprehension skills. As in, I say, “So when Google asked me if I wanted to participate in Buzz, I said no,” and then you say, “Well, if you didn’t want Buzz on your email, why did you opt-in?” Get it together, man.
- I couldn’t tell if you were a spambot or an honestly friendly person trying to offer me a tip. I’ve had a lot of nice people coming in to say, “Here’s an email provider you can use instead!”, and I have had a lot of spambots come in and say, “Here’s an email provider you can use instead!”
- You got lost in the shuffle somehow. I have a very draconian comments policy. Even if I agree with you completely, if you express your opinion in an insulting way, you don’t get through. With so many comments, it’s getting hard for me to tell who is responding to whom, so sometimes a comment looks perfectly innocuous until I realize it’s got an insult in it directed to somebody whose comment I approved this morning. I don’t like going back and re-moderating, so I err on the side of trashing. I don’t like putting a lot of time into this.
- You are a douche and have been banned. Even if you are a nice person inside! Especially if you are a nice person inside. “Nice” people act like douches, too, and they are attracted like magnets to deliver their douche opinions of raped and abused women and how they could have avoided being raped or abused. If you have started your comment with, “What did you expect…?” or “It’s your own fault if…” then you are, in fact, a douche with a heart of dumb.
Trackbacks and Pingbacks
- Who you speak to and where you are: why it matters | Geek Feminism Blog
- The new Google Buzz « A Fresh Start
Comments are closed.
Best of luck with the Google horror story, I really hope that everything works out all-right for you.
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hey, i don’t know if someone else gave you this, but i found it and i hope it works for you. a how-to article on filling up that google privacy gap.
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I had thought about many other (bad) things Google Buzz would enable, but your particular flavor of problem hadn’t even crossed my mind. I’m glad that Google has attempted to address *some* of your concerns, but it’s still troubling that their attempts to integrate social media are dangerous, opt-out, and seemingly too-much, too-soon.
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This may not come up for you, since you’re closing off buzz completely, but if you block someone, they don’t stay blocked. They can keep following you over and over, making you keep hitting “block”. So, the block feature as it exists now is fucking useless.
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OH NO i bet you are mostly taken care of – sorry, didn’t read thoroughly enough, but i meant well and stuff.
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By the by, I’m sure someone has offered by now, but in case I missed it, I’d be happy to let you use one of my domains via my server to create an email POP account if you want a different — and absolutely private — email. Just drop me a line if that’s something you want and would be helpful.
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As sucky as the situation is…at least they are making changes. Too many times you hear “well that’s the way it is and we aren’t doing anything about it because it is just fine the way it is and other people like it this way so tough shit”.
Anyway, I hope you don’t get any stalkers…and for the record I don’t blame you. I blame the idiot people that think making everything available to everyone by DEFAULT are the ones in the wrong. Some of us want to be as anon as possible.
hugs
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Just found your blog via Jez. Wanted to say that I do enjoy and will be back! Keep fighting the good fight.
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Can I ask why you didn’t change your email address when you got out of your relationship?
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God, I just read the comments on the Business Insider link, and I’m sure the Douche Army is on its way. Good luck! And bravo to you for being the kind of angry what Gets Shit Done.
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Don’t downgrade the “fuck”. Fixing the problem after they fucked your shit up big time is still worth a “fuck you”, as far as I’m concerned.
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A few reasons. First, I thought that if I cut off ALL forms of contact with my ex, that would only encourage him to forcibly track me down. I turned out to be right about that, since after I stopped answering his emails (I never answered his calls), he found my address and showed up at my apartment. The only way I could get him to leave was by promising to answer the phone, so it was clear to me that NO contact was only going to inspire him to seek out WORSE contact. I thought having to vaguely skim his emails beat out having to constantly look over my shoulder and carry a gun, so I chose that.
Second, for a while I still needed some form of contact with him. I didn’t have a lot of options when I left him. I didn’t have the money to afford a lawyer, so I was trying to figure out how to file for a divorce all on my own, while also boning up on and preparing myself for all the ways he could possibly derail the divorce. There were certain legal details I needed to discuss with him from time to time, and email seemed like the safest, easiest way to do it.
Third, I thought it was smart to allow one recordable way for him to run at the mouth. If I had cut off all contact with him and he started calling me or showing up at my house, I would have had to go to some awkward measures to try and record those encounters. If he felt free to write me long hate-filled soliloquies on email, I would have lots of evidence just piling up daily.
Fourth, it was just a damn hassle and a fucking humiliation. Until you have had to change, delete, scrub, or lie about, ignore, or just plain drop every single aspect of your life in response to another person terrorizing you, you don’t get how much of a morale suck that is. It’s just a daily reminder of, “You don’t get normal things. You don’t get a normal life. You don’t get to have an email address or a phone number, because you always have to be thinking about him, with every single thing you do.” If this had been my only reason for not changing my email, it wouldn’t have been enough. But since I had other reasons that I felt were compelling, I stuck with it.
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Hello, that is an incredibly jerky question and puts the blame right back on Harriet and she didn’t do anything wrong – in either situation, the google-fuckup or the abuse by the fuck-head. For one thing, she answered the question in the posting, that she continued to keep in contact with her abuser over email out of fear of what he would do if she didn’t. I assume she then kept the email address later to be able track whether fuck-head abuser was escalating his behavior again because he’d presumably email her something threatening. Also, if someone is abused, why should they compromise every fucking thing about themselves right down to email addresses? Its always, “why didn’t you just change everything about your life?” “why didn’t you move?”"why didn’t you change your workplace?” and it is as if someone who’s abused has every fucking resource in the world and no desire to just be able to live and breathe like a normal person.
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Your courage really is to be commended. Honestly.
What you say about those who have been labeled “FUG” took me by surprise, at first, but really makes the largest possible amount of sense given what you’re doing, here.
In this situation with Google, you really are providing a public service. And apart from the tone of the previous message (quite understandable, but making that message a bit harder to share), this is the most appropriate form of PSA I can think of.
So, thank you for this.
Sincerely.
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my ex-husband left me in 2001, for the woman he had been dating for 4-1/2 months (with my knowledge and permission; we were polyamorous). Over the course of the next five years, he and his new wife (they drove out of state to get married before our divorce was finalized here) used technology to harass me. They sent intimidating, insulting, horrible emails. They created fake profiles and lured me into connecting with them. They hired someone to hack all of my online accounts – email, Flickr, LiveJournal, etc. They printed out private LiveJournal entries about my mental health and showed them to my young children. They printed out private entries and submitted them as evidence in the custody case. They submitted three DVD-ROMs full of photos and emails and journal entries as evidence as well. They finally won custody of our children because of this technological evidence that i had an active and non-monogamous sex life, even though i never exposed my kids to that part of my life. And when i was suffering from Post-Rape Trauma Syndrome after they had custody of my kids, and couldn’t handle the harassment i had to endure over the phone in order to talk to my kids, they told me and my kids that i was lying about being raped, that i just wanted everybody to feel sorry for me, that i had always been a liar. Now my children want nothing to do with me and believe every horrible thing their father and stepmother say about me.
i’m sure they could have done much of this without the assistance of technology, but the internet sure made it easier for them. i greatly value my online privacy, even though i know what an illusion it is.
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I’m sorry all this shit happened to you. What you write about is very interesting, and I shall follow your blog.
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Yay, you are back!
I was very distressed when you took down your blog. It’s an important resource. I wanted to have my sister-in-law read the article about how we train children to be rape targets.
Thanks so much for putting the information back where I can do that.
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Oh, dear. Re-reading my comment, it came out all about me. Not quite what I intended. So, please add:
I’m glad that Google addressed SOME of your concerns. At least enough that you don’t feel quite so un-safe.
Part of Google’s problem is a lack of women.
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Harriet, you were remarkably forbearing with this commenter. I took her/his “question” to be a thinly-veiled accusation, along the lines of the “what did you expect?” b.s. you described in your post.
“Hello!” I’d bet dollars to donuts that you’re not reading any responses to your query, because asking a question and getting an answer wasn’t really your point, but for my own sake, I’d like to mention two things:
1) if you’ve read anything about Harriet’s ex elsewhere on this blog, you’d probably conclude that he would not be deterred by her changing her email address–to the contrary, he’d be incensed at her inaccessibility and redouble his efforts to find her new address or just find her, in person (as he actually did when she stopped replying to him–see Harriet’s reply below)…so, implying that Harriet could have accomplished any sort of self-protection by changing her email address really misses the point of her relationship dynamics, and those of most abusive relationships; I’d recommend actually reading what Harriet has written about abusive relationships as a primer on why the apparently simple and obvious solutions are totally ineffective with abusive partners
2) I detect a strong odor of blame and condescension coming off your simple question–perhaps because it is so simple; while you (sort of) ask permission to pose the question, you are putting Harriet on the defensive–asking her to explain her actions (her implied failure to protect herself with an address change), much as many rape and abuse victims are put on the spot and asked to defend everything from their choices of clothing (“can I ask why you were dressed like that?”) to their location (“can I ask why you were out that late in midtown?”)…all of which serves to deflect the conversation away from the victims’ points and put them in the hot seat
Your comment strikes me as a power play, in which the “simple question” gambit is used to derail a victim’s perspective and put the victim on trial instead. All while giving the questioner a Teflon-like coating of plausible deniability: “but I just asked a QUESTION!” The more concise the question, the greater the deniability of its motivation and function in the conversation.
Judging by the negative ratings on your “question,” other readers picked up on your strategy. That’s encouraging. But still, given the kind of effort Harriet puts into crafting compelling entries on subjects that hardly anyone can even be coherent about, it pisses me off that you saw fit to come to this forum and play that petty “simple question” game. She deserves better, while *you* can find lots of other online forums in which to play gotcha with authors and look like a Super Genius in the process.
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Thanks, Bee. I also suspected it wasn’t an entirely forthright question, but decided to answer it anyway. I had gotten a thousand questions just like it, but far more abusive and hateful. I chose to publish this one, and respond to it, for a few reasons. Considering how many trolls rushed to ask me why I didn’t just do some variant of dying a quiet death after leaving my abusive relationship, I can see that this is the first place people’s brains are rushing toward as soon as they hear “abusive relationship.” Some people do this because they just straight-up don’t have or want empathy, but I also know that these kinds of victim-blaming assumptions are part of a wider culture, which means that victims are drinking this stuff in as well. Victims aren’t as likely to ask these questions, for a whole host of reasons, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t carrying them around within themselves. So, there’s this ugly question out there that is culturally embedded — everybody is stumbling into it immediately — and one out of a thousand people managed to ask the question in a polite and respectful-enough way that I felt comfortable publishing it (since I wasn’t going to publish all the “so why didn’t you change your email you dumb cunt” versions of the question). That gave me the opportunity to answer this stumbling block of a question for hte people who didn’t want to ask, but could still gain something from hearing my response.
Also, people start out on the fascinating journey of “abuse exists” from a lot of sub-par levels, and can accidentally say some really heinous shit while trying to work through all their baggage. I don’t know if this commenter was one of those people, but if zhe wasn’t, I was also answering the question for all the other well-meaning but ignorant schmucks out there.
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Oh, I’m relieved to find that your blog is back up. I checked some time ago and found that it had been set to private and I was really worried that something fucking horrible had happened and you were doing it for your long-term safety.
This may seem trivial, but one of the most infuriating parts of this whole thing was how people kept… trivializing you. A “self-proclaimed” feminist (because there’s an official kind of feminism, of course) and a “troll against the rest of the world.”
I wonder if the latter had ever seen /b.
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A troll against the rest of the world? Ha! I hadn’t seen that one. I’m saving that for the tombstone.
You know, I totally had a guy come in here the other day and tell me I couldn’t possibly want my privacy because my language is so harsh. Like, obviously I really desire to be harassed at my home and place of work because I use swears. You can’t account for people’s tastes, is the way to put that diplomatically
I don’t take it personally, though sometimes it crosses the border into a little scary. Having a blog gives you a very weird window into the seething subconscious of hostile, frightened adults. Whenever it bothers me, I just try to imagine walking around like that — every day — all angry about the swears and the womenz and the feminisms and the people who criticise things I like, so angry that you have to write letters to the internet because real people refuse to interact with your opinions, and I just feel really goddamn sad. Something rotten has to happen in a person’s head for them to put the time, thought, and energy into a hate letter to a stranger, and I tend to view that rottenness as a by-product of kyriarchy, so awful comments like that are sometimes actually inspiring to me. You, conspiracy theorist of white male anxiety, living in a state of perpetual aneurysm. You are why I do this.
Of course, sometimes it’s just, “Goddamn, the internet is stupid” and I go watch Farscape in my underpants.
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Harriet, I love your blog and am glad it’s public again. Thank you for allowing the question from “Hello” and for answering it at face value. I too am a well-meaning but ignorant schmuck, as you described it, and from the priveleged position of NOT being an abuse victim, it did seem like a reasonable question.
Your answer was equal parts illuminating and terrifying. My hair is still standing on end, literally.
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