Therap informed me that there are some problems at Google. She thought it might make for an interesting blog.

I wish to discuss first, the broader issue of contracts. Republicans like to include in their discussions "The Freedom to Contract".  And they will opine that liberals wish to take away the freedom of individuals to contract and liberals wish to make the state or govment a party to each and every contract.

Without getting to the even greater issue surrounding definitions of freedom and liberty, I thought I would talk about the contract and then discuss its importance vis a vis this Google Buzz mess.

The Simple Contract

Now you decide to have your annual garage sale. And you are sitting at the end of the neighborhood cul de sac; which is the best place for a garage sale.

You have sponges on a brush which you never use as well as that damn bread making machine that never created anything worth eating. Tommy is too sophisticated to ride his bike anymore so you set the bike and the shin guards and the helmet and the older tassels into this great market place. And Anita from next door wishes to get into the action and brings over ten shamwows and three snuggies as well as some old children's mattresses. Anita's husband drinks too much sometimes and orders too much crap while watching infomercials.

Then, Frank from next door brings over his old 'as is' sign since he works as an attorney in some meaningless corporation.  He also brings over a 'receipt' book and tells you this is really important.

Anyway Tom, from two blocks down buys the bike without accoutrements as well as two snuggies and four shamwows.

Everybody signed a receipt for articles sold with a copy going to the buyer.

Contracts have been made and executed in this silly example.

Now assume that six weeks later, Andy (who is Tom's next door neighbor) gets all lickered up on Nyquil  and donning his own snuggles jumps on the bike and heads out for adventure. Tom's kid has given Andy consent to ride the bike. The left wheel falls off after the snuggie gets caught in the bicycle chain sending Andy into open traffic where an ice cream truck runs over his legs. Oh, and you knew there were some issues concerning the bicycle chain but forgot to...er...mention it.

First, let me tell you something. Crap like this is reviewed by insurance claims representatives every damn day in this country. I mean life events are not that easy to categorize.

Second, you are a homeowner so you have personal liability insurance that you never heard of. You make your mortgage payment every month and included in that payment is an escrow payment that goes for a fund set aside for property taxes and another fund that pays for your different insurance policies.

Third, Frank's malpractice insurer may well be notified because the receipts themselves do not say 'as is'.

Fourth, Tom's insurer may well be notified since it is clearly HIS BIKE NOW.

Fifth, the 'as is' sign had been covered up with an old folded picnic table that was leaned up against it because there was no damn place to put the damned picnic table.

Sixth, the ice cream truck had minimal insurance coverage that is never going to be able to cover medical treatment for the injured boy, let alone his pain and suffering. The owner of the ice cream truck has since relocated to Tuscaloosa for personal/family reasons.

Seventh, Andy's mother has medical insurance through her work with a five thousand dollar deductible and the hospital will not go ahead with rehab for the boy until the deductible is paid. No fault insurance benefits are already tapped out.

Now you can see that we have at least five insurance contracts involved in this mess besides the 'garage sale as is contract.'  Freedom to contract. Phooey.  By the way the entire matter could be even more complicated because the local law against reselling old mattresses might gum up the works.

The liability contract that everybody has in force at any one time is probably six or seven pages long and only attorneys, claims reps and obsessive/compulsive idiots ever read them. More than half the language in these policies has been written by the state or the Feds. And there are probably ten thousand pages of law relating to these liability policies in any one state.

I do not even have to begin to get into the complexity of Andy's Mother's medical insurance or the behavior of the hospital.

And Frank's boss is ready to fire him and told him that he may never participate in a garage sale again and made him sign a new contractual provision covering that contingency.

GOOGLE/BUZZ

There has been a buzz problem recently related to the use of personal computers:

SAN FRANCISCO -- When Google introduced Buzz -- its answer to Facebook and Twitter -- it hoped to get the service off to a fast start. New users of Buzz, which was added to Gmail on Tuesday, found themselves with a ready-made network of friends automatically selected by the company based on the people that each user communicated with most frequently through Google's e-mail and chat services

But what Google viewed as an obvious shortcut stirred up a beehive of angry critics. Many users bristled at what they considered an invasion of privacy, and they faulted the company for failing to ask permission before sharing a person's Buzz contacts with a broad audience. For the last three days, Google has faced a firestorm of criticism on blogs and Web sites, and it has already been forced to alter some features of the service.

E-mail, it turns out, can hold many secrets, from the names of personal physicians and illicit lovers to the identities of whistle-blowers and antigovernment activists. And Google, so recently a hero to many people for threatening to leave China after hacking attempts against the Gmail accounts of human rights activists, now finds itself being pilloried as a clumsy violator of privacy.

As Evgeny Morozov wrote in a blog post for Foreign Policy, "If I were working for the Iranian or the Chinese government, I would immediately dispatch my Internet geek squads to check on Google Buzz accounts for political activists and see if they have any connections that were previously unknown to the government."

Mr. Morozov is a researcher on the impact of the Internet on totalitarian regimes at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University under a fellowship financed by Yahoo. In an interview, he said the flap over Buzz "definitely undermines Google's credibility when it talks about freedom of expression."

In an e-mail message, Todd Jackson, product manager for Gmail and Google Buzz, said, "Google remains completely committed to freedom of expression and to privacy, and we have a strong track record of protecting both."

Mr. Jackson defended the setup of the Buzz service. He said that Buzz came with a built-in circle of contacts to provide a better experience to users and that many liked that feature. He said that it was very easy for users to edit who they were following on the service and who could follow them. He also said that anyone could hide their list of Buzz contacts with a single click.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/technology/internet/13google.html

Now I have to confess that after I was prodded by many, I set up a face book account. Well, people have different personas on different sites (is site the right word?). At any rate one of my best friends told me that I had compromised his persona on Face that he had at another site.

Then I had an epiphany. I mean, there is no way in hell I can deal with this. I mean I would not remember how to address people on different sites. I am pretty good on Email. I mean people will email me with their regular names and I do not think I have breached their persona here by using the wrong moniker as I address them.

I am Dick Day. So I am dikkday here because when you sign up for a site, you have to choose a name that has not already been chosen. And there are space concerns.  Some sites do not let you have two names with a space in between.

Anyway, I still cannot log in at Huffpo because I cannot recall for the life of me, what series of letters I used when I first signed up for Huffpo. It makes little difference to me since I really do not care to be the 152nd commenter on a four paragraph blog written by Lady Huff.  I mean who cares?

Now, from what I can gather, Google wanted to steal some fire from this Face Book thingy as well as Twitter. Twitter confuses me because I thought you used your little machine but could comment anywhere. So I guess Twitter is different than Face.

I use Yahoo mail simply because it's the first email I signed up for.  But I was thinking that I really would not wish anyone to hack into my email files because they would discern things like the 'real names' of some people here at Café. And I even recalled that on a couple occasions I contacted my own therapist through my email. Not that any information would be discerned from those communications that could not be had off of my own blogs and comments.

I actually had a conversation with a therapist though who uses email from time to time with patients. Now if the therapist used the Gmail function, GOOGLE HAS JUST COMMUNICATED TO THE WORLD WHO HIS PATIENTS ARE.

This is a mess. If my friend was briefly angry at my little error on Face, I could see how an awful lot of people are going to be angry at Google for this screw up.

And I heard tell, that Google has a lot of money. And when attorneys see an organization screwing up and that organization has a lot of money, PAPERS BEGIN TO FLY. Complaints are served and filed. Class actions and group actions and corporate actions and all sorts of actions are instituted.

And then there those whose lives are already being impacted by the privacy loopholes in  Google Buzz ¿ and not all in a good way.See for example this story of an anonymous woman who writes a (self-proclaimed) feminist blog, which she started after leaving an abusive marriage. (found on Hacker News)Hint: the title is 'Fuck you, Google'. An excerpt:I use my private Gmail account to email my boyfriend and my mother. There?s a BIG drop-off between them and my other ?most frequent? contacts.You know who my third most frequent contact is?My abusive ex-husband.Which is why it?s SO EXCITING, Google, that you AUTOMATICALLY allowed all my most frequent contacts access to my Reader, including all the comments I?ve made on Reader items, usually shared with my boyfriend, who I had NO REASON to hide my current location or workplace from, and never did. You can read the rest of the story in the blog post, but needless to say this woman is justifiably very angry with the Mountain View company. Now, I'm sure some of our readers will have an answer ready. That she should have changed this setting or not have touched that one, but that would be beside the point. Which is that even with the improvements that were made to the Buzz product, Google is confusing the hell out of people here ¿ and make some lives hell for them to boot.Expect more stories like this.(Hat tip to Alex Kaminski, photo credit Flickr/sunside)CrunchBase InformationGoogle BuzzInformation provided by CrunchBase

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/12/AR2010021201490.html

Everybody at Café has a contract with TPM.

Everybody with IE has a contract with IE.

Everybody with email has a contract with the email carrier (is it a carrier?)

Everybody with Mozella Firefox has a contract with them.

Every site you have ever commented on has a contract with you.

Okay so contract law is involved here. No doubt about it.

Oh and freedom to contract HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH NOTHING IN THIS COUNTRY ANYMORE.  You did not negotiate with Café or IE or MF or anybody else. You clicked on to agree to terms you never read when you 'signed' on. That is it. You did not negotiate crap with your insurance company except for maybe levels of coverage. You did not negotiate with visa or mastercard or any corporation you do business with.  The CEO's negotiated as did top management. But you surely did not.

THESE ARE FORM CONTRACTS. That is why the government ends up writing half the contracts or you would be screwed more than you are already being screwed. And of course the legislators who wrote those contractual provisions were bribed by lobbyists for the corporations anyway, but that is another subject for another day.

Back to civil suits and Google/Buzz.  (Oh if you have a bitch, google (hahahah) 'civil suits' against Google. Well, maybe Yahoo it. Ahahahah. I will bet you the suits have already been filed. Hahaahahah and I would bet attorneys are already advertising their services on this one. Hahahah. Sorry, I cannot stop laughing at this monumental screw up.

People have been harmed. And it could well be argued that Google had broken its own contractual provisions with its users. And it could be argued that any advertisements concerning how wonderful Google Gmail is, may over ride any clauses written in Google's contracts that would have protected it from liability.

Oh and do not think for a minute that 1) the law does not allow this or 2) the law does not allow that or 3) corporations like Google are immune to civil suits because of money and power or 3) laws were broken...yadayadayada.

FOLKS, ATTORNEYS WITH THE OPPORTUNITY TO MAKE MONEY MAKE LAWS. Hahaha

We will learn more after the first hundred depositions and after a million documents have been procured through a Demand for Production of Documents. ahahahah

But Criminal liability. Could Google/Buzz be subject to criminal sanctions? I mean people are sometimes subject to criminal sanctions. And corporations are people too. Maybe Justice Kennedy could demonstrate to us how we could imprison a corporation.

I may come back to this subject again. I am fascinated by criminal aspects here.

But what if  Google had the best of intents?

Well, what if the ice cream truck driver had the admirable intent of making it to his uncle's funeral and just did not see the boy lying in the road?  All his good intents could still get him a stiff jail sentence for criminal negligence and even for lack of proper insurance coverage.