Google entered into the social network field in February last year with Buzz, which was designed to stream external feeds very much like Twitter and their own Google Reader. It also allowed users to create public or private posts that the Buzz network users could comment upon. Gmail users were lead to believe that they could choose whether to participate in Buzz, but very soon discovered they were unable to opt out. Users also filed complaints regarding the difficulty in controlling what information was shared on Buzz. In other words, Google had created a user privacy nightmare.
The Federal Trade Commission claimed that Google violated its own privacy assurances to its users and worse yet, it violated the FTC Privacy Act. Google responded by modifying its privacy settings and making the contacts private by default, but it was too late. Complaints had piled up and the Federal Government stepped in again, this time using harsh words like “Deceptive Privacy Practices” in the official settlement press release title when it was over. This isn't the first time Google have been involved in a privacy issue around Buzz. In November of last year, Google settled a preliminary monetary agreement in a lawsuit related to Buzz.
Google apologized to its users March 30, 2011, not a common practice these days, and published an apology on its blog that included this statement: “The launch of Google Buzz fell short of our usual standards for transparency and user control letting our users and Google down. While we worked quickly to make improvements, regulators including the U.S. Federal Trade Commission unsurprisingly wanted more detail about what went wrong and how we could prevent it from happening again. Today, we’ve reached an agreement with
the FTC to address their concerns. We’ll receive an independent review of our
privacy procedures once every two years, and we’ll ask users to give us affirmative consent before we change how we share their personal information.”
Article comments
1 - Peter
The google always has violated and continues to violate the privacy of users, the clearest example of this is the browser, "Chrome" that captures the sites you visit, this is a lack of respect, because has no option when you install it or already is installed to remove, he never even told this would happen, I know they want to improve your search results, but in my opinion transparency to the user is one thing essencial. Hug!