Google Buzz is back, whether I like it or not

After all the hassles surrounding Buzz and privacy last year, you’d think Google would have learned.

Google Buzz

Maybe not. Buzz has been reintroduced to my Google account for the third time without my consent, just over a year after a part of the the internet community expressed its anger. Google has probably figured that we have all forgotten.
   And how do I disable it? By changing the setting in my Gmail account.
   The only issue is, I have never had, and do not have, a Gmail account. (Looks like my fix doesn’t work any more.)
   It looks like that when you sign up to Google, and you’ll get the works, whether you like it or not. And I think I only signed up as a Google News Alert user a decade ago: I had no desire to be given all these services I never asked for.
   Also according to the Dashboard, I again have two Adsense products (I have none, and I only ever had one account as an experiment that I closed years ago) and one Blogger blog (I have none, so what data is Google hanging on to without my consent?).
   You’d hope that things would change for the better there, but there are still remnants of the bad old days.
   Google News, I believe, is the only thing I still use from the company—the Doubleclick cookie is now blocked on my browsers, the Toolbar is history, Duck Duck Go has been my default search for months now, I continued to keep my YouTube account disconnected from Google and now don’t care that I can’t “like” a video, and when I find a way to remove myself as the Analytics admin for the Medinge Group, I might even consider shutting my account. Meanwhile, I gave Chrome a go out of fairness and discovered it was junk that crashed just as often as Firefox.
   Twenty-ten was an interesting year of de-Googling, or un-Googling, and it’s all thanks to the lousy service on Blogger. It’s actually been a good thing to disconnect. Might do a bit more work now.


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