Privacy Advocates Ask FTC To Sanction Google

google buzz

The advocacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center is asking the Federal Trade Commission to require Google to give users more control over its controversial week-old Buzz.

In a complaint filed Tuesday, EPIC argues that Buzz "violated user privacy expectations, diminished user privacy, contradicted Google's own privacy policy, and may have also violated federal wiretap laws." The group is requesting that the FTC order Google to make Buzz opt-in and to stop creating social networks out of people's Gmail address books.

"Google really tried to transform their email service into a social networking service and, in doing so, didn't give users the choice in any meaningful way to opt in," says EPIC attorney Kimberly Nguyen. The result, she says, is that Gmail users "were automatically pushed into having their address book contacts publicized to the world."

A Google spokesperson says the company has already made changes to the program and intends to continue revising it. "We designed Buzz to make it easy for users to connect with other people and have conversations about the things that interest them," the spokesperson said in a statement. "Buzz was launched only a week ago. We've already made a few changes based on user feedback, and we have more improvements in the works."

When Google initially rolled out Buzz the feature automatically transformed users' Gmail contacts into their followers -- and made that group public by default.

Much like Twitter and Facebook, Buzz enables users to broadcast their posts to a network of followers. Google obviously aimed to jumpstart its new social networking feature by using Gmail data to create social networks, but critics say that the company didn't take into account that users expect their email contacts to remain confidential.

"An address book really reveals a lot about a person," Nguyen says, adding that people's email contacts include the names of their lawyers, doctors, coworkers and others who users would prefer not to publish. Business Insider senior editor Nicholas Carlson called attention to this issue last week in a post mentioning that journalists who used Gmail could find their confidential sources had become known to the world at large.

Since launching on Feb. 9, the company 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 EPIC argues that the revisions don't go far enough to protect people's privacy -- in part because users can only block specific contacts from following them after-the-fact. EPIC also alleges that Google still isn't adequately informing users that lists of followers are publicly available. "Google has not announced any changes to the pop-up screen that appears when a user initially posts on Google Buzz," the group says in its FTC complaint. "Users are still unaware that showing the user's connection means showing connections publicly to everyone, and having them publicly indexed by search engines."

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