What's the buzz about Buzz??

Google in the news, again.....

Google sought on Thursday night to quell an outcry over the privacy settings in its new Buzz social networking service, which critics have claimed exposes personal information about users without their approval.

The internet company acknowledged the concerns raised by the service, launched just two days before, and announced changes designed to stem the fears, though these did not directly address all the complaints from some critics.

Its change of heart follows a growing chorus of complaints on the web. One privacy advocacy group told the Financial Times that it planned to file an official complaint with US regulators over the affair.

The outcry has centred on the way Buzz automatically creates a social network for new users by drawing on the people they communicate with most frequently over Gmail, Google’s e-mail system. This list of personal e-mail contacts is then made public over Buzz by default, although users can choose to override the system to hide it.

“People are surprised that Google treated a private [e-mail] contact list as a public ‘friends’ list,” said Marc Rotenberg, head of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. He said that the list should not automatically be made public, and that he would lodge a Federal Trade Commission complaint next week.

See the full article in the Financial Times HERE.