In the wake of recent outcry over the handling of default privacy settings in Google Buzz — the social networking enhancement to Gmail that debuted only days ago — Google is taking new steps to curb concerns. eSecurityPlanet looks at the company’s response.
Just two days after launching its social e-mail product Buzz, Google has modified the privacy settings for the service to give users greater visibility into how their information and relationships are shared.
The move follows heated criticism over the default setting of the service, which made public people’s Gmail contacts with whom they wrote or chatted with the most frequently.
“In particular there’s been concern from some people who thought their contacts were being made public without their knowledge (in particular the lists of people they follow, and the people following them),” Todd Jackson, Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) product manager for Buzz and Gmail, wrote In a blog post explaining the changes.