A female blogger is angry - very angry - at the way that Google Buzz assumes she wants to show everyone who she's been emailing

Owch. Google Buzz has demonstrated precisely why - and how - engineers really shouldn't be let loose with human relationships.

In an angry (and swear-ful, if you're sensitive) posting, "Harriet Jacobs"* takes the search engine giant to task for revealing, through Buzz, her present relationships to "my abusive ex-husband".

She explains:

"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.

"My other most frequent contacts? Other friends of [boyfriend] Flint's.

"Oh, also, people who email my ANONYMOUS blog account, which gets forwarded to my personal account. They are frequent contacts as well. Most of them, they are nice people. Some of them are probably nice but a little unbalanced and scary. A minority of them — but the minority that emails me the most, thus becoming FREQUENT — are psychotic men who think I deserve to be raped because I keep a blog about how I do not deserve to be raped, and this apparently causes the Hulk rage."

To which of course Google will say (adopt meerkat voice) "Just edit your public profile! Simples!"

Jacobs's rejoinder:

"I can't block these people, because I never made a Google profile or Buzz profile, due to privacy concerns (apparently and resoundingly founded!). Which doesn't matter anyway, because every time I do block them, they are following me again in an hour. I'm hoping that they, like me, do not realize and are not intentionally following me, but that's the optimistic half of the glass. My pessimistic half is of the abyss, and it is staring back at you with a redolent stink-eye."

This, of course, is the failure of the engineering imagination to deal with the reality of human interaction. Google tested Buzz internally a great deal before releasing it (the product was called "Taco Town" during testing) but the weakness of that is that it doesn't have many people who really hate each other internally. Or perhaps none. And of course stalking would be the sort of thing that would lose you your job at Google.

It's when you get into the grey outside world though that the black-and-white certainties that Google thinks it can apply to search (but which it actually tweaks repeatedly to stave off the people trying to game the search results) break down. And quickly.

We can hope that this real-world example will demonstrate to Google that it has made a real mistake by not letting people opt very carefully in to Buzz. But the question is, will it?

* It's a pseudonym. (Ta, Robin Wauters at TechCrunch.)