The latest inception of Google Buzz has raised a lot of dust and protest from those who are supporters of privacy-protection, including those who use Google’s Gmail services often. The whole thing was as though some users felt blindsided, since the opt-in process was quite automatic. A lot of people protested and wanted their privacy to be respected and protected.
From the outset of Buzz until now, Google has put so many notable changes in place. You can opt-out if you choose to, and the option for this choice has been made easily reachable. You can also use other control options such as ‘blocking’ and ‘unfollowing’.
However, it’s still not that easy to grab how Buzz works, and to know exactly what the next button you are clicking may land you to. If you are not tech-savvy, you would certainly get stuck navigating your way around Buzz features. Definitely, Buzz is not something a kid can understand or meddle with.
This leads us to the exciting point. There has been a sharp criticism by renowned bloggers who claimed that Google Buzz is the cause of their kids’ exposure to an undesirable public audience. One of these tech bloggers posted a blog recently; according to the blog, her daughter (barely 10-year old) sent her a mail which ended up being visible to the public! She was meddling with Google Buzz without knowing exactly its consequences. According to this influential blogger, her daughter is not alone in this ignorant act. Her friends are also ignorantly sharing their personal emails with unknown people.
Well, this popular blogger did not waste time to disable the Buzz feature on her 9-year old daughter’s Gmail account and also alerted other parents about this development. He went ahead to publicly rail at Google – saying that Buzz is a nightmare to parental control.
A representative from Google replied to the railings; “You must have a Gmail account to have access to Google Buzz, and children under age 13 are not supposed to have Gmail account according to the stipulated terms of service”. It is actually written in black and white – just that we do not usually take time to read the terms of services before opting for them. Yahoo! also have similar terms of service; in fact, Yahoo! went as far as indicating that kids can only access Yahoo! services through a family Yahoo account created by parents, and each child must be independently authorized to use the account.
Well, several comments were made on this Google Buzz blog post; half of the people who posted comments were on the side of Google, while the other half rained on the blame on the blog poster for allowing a kid at that tender age to own an e-mail account in the first place.
What’s your own opinion? Do you think it is possible to keep kids under the age of 13 from accessing email? Google as well as social network sites constantly make their user policy known (which includes privacy protections), and also advocates the benefit accruing from info-sharing. So, how can you really protect your kid from all these mix-ups? Let’s know what you think.
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