Google Buzz Privacy Issues Stir Response From Canadian Government

Life was pretty good last week for Google. The tech world was buzzing (HAAA!!) about its new social networking service, it acquired Aardvark to potentially make things even better, it announced its upcoming broadband efforts and it addressed some of the major issues with Nexus One. Then, when people actually started using Buzz, things went awry in Mountain View. 

As with the Nexus One, Google made it clear that it is a search engine company first and foremost, not a retailer, not a social networking company. While Buzz sounded convenient enough on the surface, there was one huge problem: in automatically searching through your Gmail contacts and adding some to the social networking element, it greatly trounced upon users’ privacy, bringing contacts to the forefront that users didn’t necessarily want brought–think abusive ex-spouses, mistresses, political dissidents, etc.

Well that privacy breach ain’t goin’ over so well with the general Gmail population, and it ain’t going over so well with official parties either. Canada’s Office of the Privacy Commissioner (wish we had one of those) is looking into complaints about Buzz. Here in the U.S., the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a public interest research center, is in the process of filing a complaint with the FCC.

Google has since eliminated the glaring privacy issue, replacing the auto-follow with a suggested follow feature that gives users control over who makes their followers list. The company is now working on additional changes that are expected as early as this week. [via CBS News]