Google’s Buzz Criticized Heavily
March 9th, 2010
You would think that Google, the internet’s most dominant firm would learn from mistakes made by others and tend to not repeat the same mistake again. For once, the internet giant has managed to get something horribly wrong. Its latest offering, Google Buzz has been criticized for lack of concern for privacy issues, the same criticism levelled at Facebook last year.
Buzz was launched by Google, an attempt by the company to get on to the increasingly popular social networking bandwagon. In reality, Buzz was poorly thought out which resulted in Google receiving a lot of heat for it.
The application was supposed to be a means to enable users to share their online status, multimedia content and social media streams via Gmail. When it was given to all 176 million Gmail users, the application automatically allowed users to follow all the people in their Gmail contacts list.
This feature received a lot of criticism from users as anyone could now gain access to their status, simply because they were on the person’s contact list, thus violating their privacy. Google apologized for the inconvenience caused to its users and was additionally forced to tone down the application’s functionality.
Despite the apology and the changes to the application, it appears that Google will not be let off with only a rap on its knuckles. To add to its woes, a leading
The Electronic Privacy Information Centre (Epic) has asked the Federal Trade Commission to intervene in the issue. Epic wants the FTC to tell Google to issue notices to request consent from Gmail users before making changes to their privacy policy in future. The privacy group has also asked the FTC to ban Google from using Gmail address books to build social networking lists.
Whether you’re concerned about internet safety or just the safety of your download limits getting the broadband deal that is right for you can be a juggling act. If you choose your broadband provider through Broadband Genie, you’ll be given all the information you need about each supplier on their easy to use comparison table to help you decide which of the broadband providers is the best suited for you.

















