Google’s Buzz Violates Privacy; Irks Users
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010
The internet giant, Google has not only managed to inadvertently abuse the privacy of its long time Gmail users but now also faces investigations by government regulators. The company is one of the largest online companies and is involved with almost every known internet application. Google’s offerings are wide and diverse with almost all its applications intertwined. Its Gmail offers consumers e-mail facilities, G-talk is their instant messenger, ad sense helps people make money online. Google, in fact, has managed to percolate the web to such an extent that its presence can be felt almost everywhere you look.
To ensure that they kept their market share, Google recently launched Google Buzz. It sought to introduce Google to social networking and help it become a major player in the social networking scene. Expected to be the next step forward in social networking, this new offering by Google, however, has surprisingly managed to fall flat on its face as consumers are not at all happy with the Google Buzz service.
Launched recently, Buzz was supposed to be a platform to share status updates, multimedia and social media streams via Gmail. Buzz was built in such a way that users could automatically follow everyone in their Gmail contact list, without obtaining any specific permission from their contacts. This clearly did not sit well with users, who were aghast at what they perceived as a blatant invasion of their privacy. Following an outcry from consumers reprimanding Google, it has been forced to not only apologize to its users, but it has also had to tone down some of Buzz’s functionality.
A leading
Arch rival Facebook had been in a similar situation and had to face a lot of heat from its consumers as it had change their privacy setting without informing them almost a year back. It was surprising for most that Google committed the same mistakes that Facebook had. Google though has learnt a lesson the hard way and realized that though consumers love social networking they would not stand for abuse of their privacy no matter what the brand name.
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