Legal News

Google Stung By Its Own Buzz

By Nathan Koppel

Google has agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it used deceptive tactics and violated privacy promises to consumers when it launched its “Google Buzz” social network last year.

(Here’s the FTC press release on the settlement, and click here for a WSJ article and here for a Bloomberg write up).

The settlement requires the Web-search giant to implement a “comprehensive privacy program,” Google said.

Google Buzz, for the uninitiated, was a feature built into Gmail that allowed users’ email contact lists to be automatically visible to the public, Bloomberg reports.

Google led Gmail users to believe that they could choose whether to join the  Buzz network, the FTC alleged, but the controls for limiting the sharing of personal information were confusing and difficult to find.

In the wake of the Buzz launch, “Google received thousands of complaints from consumers who were concerned about public disclosure of their email contacts which included, in some cases, ex-spouses, patients, students, employers, or competitors,” the FTC said in its statement, adding that Google made change to Buzz in response to the complaints.

The settlement, Bloomberg reports, flows from a complaint filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington, D.C. advocacy group.

“The FTC settlement with Google is far-reaching,” EPIC said in a statement. “For Internet users, it should lead to higher privacy standards and better protection for personal data.”

The launch of Google Buzz “fell short of our usual standards for transparency and user control,” Alma Whitten, Google’s director of privacy, said in a post on the company’s blog.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 30, 2011 (boomark / email).