Google moved quickly over the weekend to try to contain mounting criticism of Buzz, its social network, apologizing to users for features widely seen as endangering privacy while announcing product changes to address those concerns.
Todd Jackson, product manager for Gmail and Google Buzz, wrote in a blog post on Saturday that Google had decided to alter one of the most-criticized features in Buzz: the ready-made circle of friends the service provided to new users based on their most frequent e-mail and chat contacts in Gmail.
Instead of automatically connecting people, Buzz will in the future merely suggest to new users a group of people they may want to follow or be followed by, he said.
Jackson, who said that the auto-follow feature had been designed to make it easy for people to get started on Buzz, acknowledged the criticism that was heaped on Google in the last few days.
‘VERY SORRY’
“We’re very sorry for the concern we’ve caused and have been working hard ever since to improve things based on your feedback,” Jackson wrote. “We’ll continue to do so.”
The startup for Buzz, which Google introduced last Tuesday as its answer to Facebook and Twitter, drew angry responses on technology blogs and beyond, as users feared that the names of their e-mail correspondents would be publicly exposed. A set of changes that Google announced on Thursday failed to quell the uproar.
Some critics said the latest modifications to Buzz, which is tightly coupled with Gmail, appeared to have addressed the most serious privacy concern.
“Turning off the auto-follow was a huge improvement,” Danny Sullivan, a longtime Google analyst and the editor of SearchEngineLand, said in an e-mail message.
FEDERAL COMPLAINT
Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said his organization was still intending to file a complaint with the US Federal Trade Commission this week pending its review of Google’s changes.
“Even with these changes, there is still the concern that Gmail users are being driven into a social networking service that they didn’t sign up for,” Rotenberg said in an interview on Sunday.
The privacy concerns about Buzz, and Google’s rapid efforts to address its critics, echo incidents that have bedeviled other social networks, most notably Facebook.
None of those incidents have slowed the growth of Facebook, which recently said it had reached more than 400 million users. Gmail has 176 million users, according to the research firm comScore.
“I think the privacy issues earlier this week with Buzz will blow over and not harm the product in the long term,” Sullivan said.
However, privacy will continue to haunt Google, he said, and many people will point to the release of Buzz as an attempt by Google to overreach and a reason that the company could not be trusted.
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