• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, March 3, 2010

A watchdog group that recently asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Google Buzz has supplemented its complaint with an allegation that the new service violates Google's own privacy policy.

"At the time that Google introduced Google Buzz, the personal information section of the Gmail privacy notice promised to its users that the company would only use their contact lists and other related data 'in order to provide the service to you,'" the Electronic Privacy Information Center alleges in new papers.

EPIC alleges that Google violated this policy by using contact lists for a purpose other than its email service. But one potential problem with this argument is that it isn't clear that Buzz is separate from email.

Google itself describes Buzz as "a new feature built into Gmail."

But EPIC attorney Jared Kaprove says that people don't expect email services to include the social networking elements that came with Buzz. "If Google was to make the argument that Buzz is part of Gmail, that would be fairly disingenuous," he says. "Users know what email is."

When Google rolled out Buzz last month, the service automatically transformed users' Gmail contacts into their followers -- and made that group public by default. Like Twitter and Facebook, Buzz enables users to broadcast their posts to a network of followers. Google clearly hoped to get a leg up on competitors by using Gmail data to create social networks, but critics say that the company didn't take into account that users don't necessarily want their email contacts to become publicized.

Google quickly revised Buzz in response to complaints. Among other changes, the company replaced a feature that automatically includes other users as followers with one that merely suggests followers.

But Kaprove says that the service shouldn't even automatically make suggestions unless people have affirmatively instructed Buzz to do so. "It should be an entirely separate service that you have to choose to activate," he says.

Google said in a statement that it intends to make more revisions to Buzz and is also open to suggestions about the service. "We've already made changes based on user feedback, and we have more improvements in the works," the company stated. "We also welcome dialogue with EPIC and appreciate hearing directly from them about their concerns."