In case you haven't heard, Google's Buzz service is the latest privacy apocalypse – check out a nice short summary here, or the details here, here, or here. Now Google has responded by tweaking its service to address some but not all of the privacy concerns. And yet there are still some fairly horrifying implications of Google's move.

I'll let other more knowledgeable folks take a swing at the nature of the privacy debate. I think this whole debacle reveals a more fundamental flaw in the way web companies handle online privacy today: they treat it as a one-size-fits-all phenomenon. Google sat down to make decisions about how to share information for Buzz users. Undoubtedly they started with a list of outcomes that would be good for Google. Then they probably started to imagine the user, and they wanted to make it easy to manage the service. They saw themselves as simplifying what some think is a tedious process of finding friends, managing connections, sharing content. They thought their innovation would be to make all that happen auto-magically. And once they came up with a solution they liked, they shoved it down our collective throat. We revolted (vomited) at their presumption. So they made a few changes. But it's still pretty much like the Gap selling all its clothes in XXL.

I think the diversity of responses to Buzz and its privacy implications should encourage us to stop thinking of privacy as a unitary concept. Attitudes about privacy are personal and contextual. Some people will decide that Buzz is so brilliant, it shouldn't matter that there are some privacy hiccups. Some people are so used to transparently sharing their online lives that revealing all their contacts wouldn't make a difference to them. Others, of course, will have the opposite reaction and feel completely and utterly violated. I myself fall squarely in the middle. I won't be using Buzz, at least in the short term. And my primary reaction is to be angry at Google for having the gall to do this. They knew exactly what they were doing – this was not a privacy "accident" – but they decided it didn't matter. They decided to try and dictate the next privacy norm to us via their awesome power.

The single worst thing about the web right now is that it tries to squeeze all us irregular geometric shapes into the same round hole. There has been almost no effort to assess privacy attitudes and adapt to them. And I'm not talking about opt-in and opt-out, or the types of (seemingly but not really) fine-grained privacy and sharing choices that Facebook recently implemented. I think Google's impulse was probably right: it's a lot to ask of many users to manage all that themselves, especially as systems are so complex and the tendrils and traces of our content and behavior spread out across the web through APIs. But it wasn't right for everyone. In fact, it wasn't right for most people. The $10 billion question is: how can we tell the difference between users, and adapt the experience to what they want? The pace of innovation over the last 10 years has been accompanied by social norms that move so fast they can be easily pushed around by the behemoths of the web. I suspect that era is coming to a close, and companies like Google and Facebook will have to start responding to our attitudes about things like privacy, trust, and motivation rather than trying to dictate them to us.