• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, February 18, 2010

Adding to Google's Buzz-related woes, a student at Harvard Law has sued the company for allegedly "forcing all Gmail users to share their personal data in a public forum."

In papers filed this week in federal district court in San Francisco, Eva Hibnick alleges that Buzz violated federal privacy laws by publicly disclosing information about Gmail users' contacts.

"An individual's email contacts may be a different group of people (for example, professional contacts), than the group with whom a user would want to be in a social network," she alleges. "By implementing the Buzz program, Google forced upon its Gmail users Google's own definition of a proper social network, all in an effort to jump-start Google's entry into a new consumer market."

When Google initially rolled out Buzz on Feb. 9, the feature automatically transformed users' Gmail contacts into their followers -- and made that group public by default. Since launching, Google has already revised Buzz twice. In one of its most recent changes, the company replaced a feature that automatically includes other users as followers with one that merely suggests followers.

But Hibnick alleges that the revisions don't adequately address the problem. "The bell of breached privacy cannot be un-rung," she argues.

Hibnick specifically alleges that Google violated several federal laws, including the Stored Communications Act and Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

But Hibnick doesn't state in her complaint that she herself was harmed by Buzz. Without such an assertion, Hibnick might not be able to pursue her claim in court, says Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman. "There's case law saying that if you don't show some tangible damage, you don't have standing to bring a claim," Goldman says.

At the same time, Goldman says, Google's decision to harness Gmail data for Buzz could be problematic for the company because federal laws specifically protect the privacy of email communications. "The fact that Google merged Gmail and Buzz raises a concern that this was a violation of all the laws that apply to email," he says.

He adds that while Google's initial decisions about Buzz were questionable, the company acted quickly to correct the problem. "There's so much evidence that you don't configure the defaults the way that they configured them. I was really shocked that they made such a rookie mistake," he says. But, he adds, "they realized they made a mistake. They should have avoided it -- but to their credit they fixed it quickly."