We're not talking about the relationship between her and Google, but the one between her and her ex-husband, into which google has unwittingly interposed itself.
She willingly included Google in that relationship by making him a contact and giving Google information that they had a relationship.
You can't give away information and expect it not to be acted upon. Corporations are not bound by anything except for the law and the contract they form with you. If it's within their rights, they can and will act upon it.
It sounds like there are two issues here. First, that Google assumed that because they were 'frequent contacts' that they were best friends, and thus him and all his jackass friends were made followers on her Google Reader.
The second is that all the people that frequently contact HER (via an anonymous account which forwards to her Google account) now have her personal Gmail account and are following her on Buzz (and Google Reader), which she can't stop from happening.
The problem is that Google's assumed that anyone with whom you correspond frequently is a friend with whom you're willing to share all of your data, when in reality a lot of people are forced to correspond with people whom they don't like at all, and that Google shouldn't be saying 'Hey, we've created a new thing called Buzz, and we've told everyone all about you on your behalf!'
Edit: also worth mentioning: you don't 'make someone a contact' in Gmail, Google does it for you automatically whenever you e-mail someone. Also, she didn't give Google information that they were in a relationship, Google just did this automatically. Even people that she e-mailed from an anonymous address via gmail got access to her profile. Google basically gave everyone her personal info without asking if it was ok, and now she can't take it back.
> The second is that all the people that frequently contact
> HER (via an anonymous account which forwards to her Google
> account) now have her personal Gmail account and are
> following her on Buzz (and Google Reader), which she can't
> stop from happening.
Until now, hiding your mail address from spam was one of the biggest concerns one had with email. Now, that might turn into hiding from Google. Or at least circumventing where we don't want it to do something with our private data we do not agree with.
She must have replied fairly regularly to these individuals; I get around 10 emails a week from one individual to whom I have replied around once a month - and they never got auto-added.
Not quite. I peeked at the Buzz thing, and saw that it has me auto-following people whom I've never corresponded in any fashion. How exactly does one "willingly include" Google in a relationship one never had?
A "contact" is someone who you email frequently. That's it. It's entry in an address book.
A user signs up for email from gmail. They don't sign up for "networking". Whatever the fine print might be, it would be clear to her and to any neutral judge that she didn't ask to have Google give her information to her contact.
