Google Buzz -- a further rant

This morning is the first time that I've had both time and functioning brain since Google launched their shiny new "all your privacy are belong to us" service. I hadn't explicitly intended to do some slash and burn on the thing, but it was also the first time since then that I'd done my regular check round my various specialist Gmail accounts to see that they are running smoothly. Since I hadn't logged into the zine publisher account at all in the last couple of months, the first thing I'm greeted with there is the Buzz welcome splash screen.

It's *still* heavily slanted to making it as easy as possible to accept it and as hard as possible to escape from, although it's not as actively deceptive as it was. But what I find really, really annoying is that it won't tell me anything about how to use it (or not use it, as the case may be) unless I am either willing to sit through some @#$%^ing video, or do some digging to find the help text without having to watch the video first. What looks like it might be a link to non-video turns out to be a link to a page with some inane "look at the cool things you can do" text, and that video again. They really want you to watch that video.

Do Not Want.

Let me say that again.

DO NOT WANT.

What *is* it with this insistence on making new users sit through videos, instead of giving them the text? I could read and absorb several pages of help file in the time it takes them to get through the chirpy "hi, this is a wonderful new thing and I'm going to tell you how wonderful a thing it is!!!" Why am I required to sit through some linear, slow experience that does not actually tell me what I need to know?

Yes, I know that a lot of their target market prefer or need a video, and preferably a dumbed down video. Fine. Let them have it. But some of us are wired to find it easier to take in information as text. Please, please, please give us a "skip the video" link that takes us straight to the text version of the "read me first".

And when I get to the settings -- oh look, it still defaults to showing your follower/following lists to the world. You have to make an active choice to turn on privacy, or it'll display that stuff as soon as you post your first Buzz.

[headdesk]

This is a tool I might have actually found useful if it had not been a continuing display of disrespect for user privacy. I cannot trust this thing not to start disgorging information that should not be public without explicit opt-in authorisation, and thus I cannot use it.

LiveJournal is cheating bloggers out of their privacy -- and their affiliate fees

I first saw romance blogger Elisa Rolle talking about her affiliate links being re-written to Livejournal's benefit a couple of weeks ago, but I'd just got off a very long haul flight and was too jet-lagged to post about it coherently at the time. Now other people have noticed LiveJournal hijacking affiliate links. And not just actual affiliate links, but anything that looked a bit like one of the big commercial sites with affiliate schemes.

Once a lot of people started shouting about this, LJ did its usual "oops, we never meant you to notice th... er, never meant the code to do that." My reaction is, pull the other one, it hath bells on. However, while they appear to have backtracked on this at least in part, at least until next time, Livejournal are flannelling on refunding the affiliate fees they hijacked from Elisa, plus insulting her as well for being pissed off at being fobbed off and lied to over the last couple of weeks. I'd suggest reading Elisa's latest post on the subject, for a nice detailed timeline of how they have repeatedly lied about this over the course of some weeks.

I'm less than pleased about this, both on my own behalf and for my friends. Please don't tell me that affiliate links are banned by LJ terms of service -- what the ToS ban are banner ads, and you'd have to be intent on finding some justification for this fraud to claim that affiliate text links fall under that heading. And this isn't just stripping such links, this is actively re-writing links in a deceptive manner, so that when you hover over the links you see what the blogger intended you to be passed to, and only when you click the link is it re-written on the fly to send you somewhere else without your knowledge. In other words, the sort of tactic used by phishers and other people who do not have your best interests at heart.

Think about that. LJ thinks it's fine for them to silently re-direct you anywhere they choose, and to use third-party technology to do so without bothering to test exactly what it's doing. I can think of some really *interesting* things to do with that. The sort of things that are illegal under The Computer Misuse Act 1990.

And on a less legalistic level -- I pay for my account. I pay for it so that my LJ is an ad-free zone. I mainly use the affiliate links as a way of tracking which of my "shiny thing you can buy" posts people are finding most useful, and I do not appreciate having that functionality taken away from me so they can make more money off my paid-for account. I also do not appreciate having links randomly hijacked to be turned into ads simply because they pattern match some unrelated commerce website's url.

In case it is "accidentally" re-enabled, a description of the opt-out here:
http://caffeinepuppy.livejournal.com/214632.html

Testing, testing....

Just testing a bit of DreamWidth cross-posting functionality. See previous post for why.