Google Buzz was launched on the 9th of February 2010, introduced without ceremony into the inboxes of Gmail’s then-176 million users as a social layer intended to unite status updates, links, and conversation beneath the roof of electronic correspondence. Within hours of its birth, it had committed the gravest possible sin against the trust of its users: by automatically connecting individuals to their most frequently contacted Gmail correspondents and making those connections publicly visible, it exposed the private lives of abuse survivors, the identities of anonymous sources, and the undisclosed relationships of persons who had sought no such disclosure. A privacy catastrophe unfolded in real time, and the subsequent Federal Trade Commission investigation produced a consent decree that would follow Google for twenty years.

The service was shuttered in December 2011, subsumed into the ambitions of Google+, which itself would not long survive. Buzz had lasted less than two years. It is remembered not for the conversations it hosted — which were, by some accounts, genuinely lively — but for what it revealed about the carelessness with which a large institution may handle the intimate arrangements of ordinary lives. It died as it had been born: as a lesson.