Google Buzz, the social service that Google launched way back in 2010 and then killed in 2011, reminded former users that their data still lives in and will be moved over to your Google Drive accounts in July. That’s lovely.
The email describes exactly what will happen with your data, which won’t count against your Drive storage limits, thankfully.
If you don’t delete the data and let Google move your stuff to Drive, it says that the public Buzz posts you shared in the past “may appear in search results and on your Google Profile.” OK, then.
Here’s the entire email in case you’ve filtered out Buzz communication to go directly to Spam or Trash:
In October 2011 we announced Google Buzz was shutting down. On or after July 17th, 2013, Google will take the last step in the shutdown and will save a copy of your Buzz posts to your Google Drive, a service for storing files online. Google will store two (2) types of files to your Google Drive, and the newly-created files will not count against your storage limits. If you’d like to wipe Buzz from your online world completelly, go here and delete the data now: https://profiles.google.com/me/deletebuzz
1. The first type of file will be private, only accessible to you, containing a snapshot of the Google Buzz public and private posts you authored.
2. The second type of file will contain a copy of only your Google Buzz public posts. By default it will be viewable by anyone with the link, and may appear in search results and on your Google Profile (if you’ve linked to your Buzz posts). Note, any existing links to your Google Buzz content will redirect users to this file.
3. Any comments you made on other users’ posts will only be saved to those users’ files and not to yours. Once the change described in this email is final, only that user will be able to change the sharing settings of those files. This means that if you have commented on another author’s private post, that author could choose to make that post and its comments public. If you would like to avoid that possibility, delete all your Buzz content now.
4. The new Google Drive files will only contain comments from users that previously enabled Google Buzz, and the files will not contain comments that were deleted prior to moving the data to your Google Drive.Once the files are created, they will be treated the same as any other Drive file. They are yours to do with as you please. This includes downloading them, updating who can access them, or deleting them.
Before these files are created, you can view the Google Buzz posts you have authored here. If you do not want any of your Buzz posts or comments saved to Google Drive files, you can immediately delete your Google Buzz account and data.
Thank you for using Google Buzz.
Since Google mentions that you can delete your data not once, but twice, in the email, that’s the course of action that I’ll be taking.
Buzz never took off, and Google went on to focus all of its efforts on Google+. There were a slew of reasons why Buzz didn’t work, mostly centered around privacy. The close integration with Gmail made the entire experience a mess, blurring the lines between what should be personal and what should be public.
This is clearly the last step for Google to completely rid itself of the product, and all of the privacy concerns and issues that cropped up around the product. Oh, and just in case you missed that delete link, here it is again.
Thank you, Google.