Google Buzz, the search giant’s effort to build a social networking experience on top of its Gmail service, didn’t get off to the smoothest of starts. The service quickly became mired in a privacy controversy when bloggers others sounded the alarm that accepting the default settings could share more information with the world than some people would be comfortable with.
In the two months since the launch, Google has updated the privacy settings to give users clearer control over which connections are made public, but what about the early adopters — those people who may have unknowingly accepted the defaults before Google made the changes?
Now it’s moving to address that issue, asking users who signed onto the service early to review and confirm their public contacts as the company hopes to tamp down the privacy concerns that have been gaining steam in policy circles.
E-Commerce Guide takes a look at the latest privacy update to Google Buzz.
Seeking to quell an ongoing controversy over the privacy implications of its new social networking service, Google is urging Buzz users to review and update their lists of contacts.
The next time users sign into Buzz, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) will display a prompt asking them to confirm the people they are following and who is following them, seeking to eliminate the unhappy scenario of publishing to the Web all the contacts with whom a person wrote or chatted most frequently.
While social networking has emerged as one of the dominant trends online today — enabling companies and consumers to stay in contact and forge new relationships — it’s also become a source of widespread worry for IT administrators and consumer advocates, who have grown concerned about all the information that can leak out without a user or organization’s knowledge.
