Watchdog says Google Buzz is Breaking Privacy Laws
The Electronic Privacy Information Centre (Epic) has lodged a complaint with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC). It states that Google's new social networking offering Buzz is "deceptive" and breaks consumer protection laws.
Kim Nguyen, Epic's consumer privacy counsel, said "Twitter is a social networking site and people know what they are signing up for. With Gmail, users signed up for an e-mail service not a social networking service... they still do not give users a meaningful way to opt into it."
Buzz was automatically rolled out to Gmail's 176 million users last week, and has since received a large amount of criticism. The feature that attracted the biggest outcry was one which automatically gave users a ready-made circle of friends to follow based on the people they emailed the most. This meant their list of contacts was public and could have had serious implications for journalists, businesses or even those involved in illicit affairs.
Google has apologised and tried to address the concerns. Their engineers have now introduced a new option to disable the service and replaced the auto-follow feature with one that suggests who to follow.
EPIC has responded by saying the changes still leave the "user with the burden to block unwanted followers".
