If you thought that big corporations are disaster proof, think again. Internet search giant Google’s Gmail integrated application for social networking, named Buzz, has turned out to be a debacle for the corporation.

Buzz was launched a few weeks ago, and many pre-release reviews proclaimed it to be the last word in online social interaction. Offered to approximately 176 million users of Gmail and developed as a platform to share multimedia content and social updates, it was criticized by many as a total privacy abuse. Google’s attempt to gain a hold in the social networking area backfired drastically, mainly because it doesn’t seem to have been a well thought out process. Buzz’s feature that automatically allows customers to follow their mail contacts all at once, drew flak for Google. The company was made to apologize and also to reduce the extent to which Buzz allowed interactive functionality.

This wasn’t the end of Google’s woes where Buzz is concerned. A privacy rights group in the United States has also called for an investigation by regulatory authorities to determine whether Google Buzz is violating consumer protection laws. The Electronic Privacy Information Center requested the Federal Trade Commission to make it mandatory for Google to ask for user consent and provide notice to Gmail users before making any physical modifications to their privacy policies in the future. It has also asked for banning Google from using its Gmail address books archives to develop social networking catalogues.

This is clearly a warning for the future if the need arises, that privacy breach will not be tolerated at all, even if customers use social networking. An example of zero tolerance was given to Facebook last year when it had changed the privacy settings of its users without prior notice, causing public outrage.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 at 7:35 am and is filed under Consumer Life, Telecommunication Infos, Virtual Social. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.