A thread on Slashdot alarmed me, just a little bit, for some minutes. Privacy is indeed a real concern when it comes to email management. When your [mine] gmail account stores gigas of personal emails, all legit stuff yet still private and by no means public!

The alert lady, "thanking" Google for its Buzz exposing her to some stalker, turned out to be her own many unthought-of clicks' victim.

Yes, given the case you won't even like your [nick]name to show up in the buzz socionet, then the lady is perfectly right with her concerns. However, creating yourself a buzz public profile is by far not a given. You're having to click your way willingly out through several dialog boxes before creating yourself a public profile on Google Buzz.

Definitely, the terms "followers" or "following" may cause some privacy panic, mostly within the ranks of the beautiful gender. But the extent of your exposure is a measure to fine tune at your fingertips.

An excerpt on Buzz usage: "At least it hadn't been fixed when i tested it a couple hours ago. If you go to the profile settings there is an option called "Display my full name so I can be found in search." If you uncheck that box and save it your profile will now say "visible to the public as [whatever your nickname is]." You'll also get a warning about how your profile won't be searchable as long as that option is disabled, which is exactly what one would expect from the description."

Besides the clear settings, there are some questionable interface dialogs that won't tell you everything about re-activating your public profile, which is same thing with making your profile searcheable.

Now, about email privacy. Some would blame paranoia on Gmail and feel safe with Outlook on their client machines. Forgetting that mail servers have to be owned by some company, other than Google, after all. Then non PGP, or GPG, encrypted mail travels in the open anyway. Then PGP/GPG mail may trigger flags on some tracking screens down in various bunkers. So if we're happy with our paranoia, then why limit it exclusively to Google?

Paranoia-wise, Google's approach on doing business seems to me safer than one or more of the following:

a. Outlook mail clients on Windows machines [the hazard of hazards];

b. your ISP mail servers with dreadfully limited features and extra charges for the next mega of storage...

c. Yahoo mail or other web based similar services.

Ultimately, you may build your own mail server in the basement, secure it and happy run services until Chloe O'Brien will hack in to see if you're related to Ahmed...