WASHINGTON — A privacy watchdog group is complaining to federal regulators about Google’s new Buzz social networking service, calling it a violation of federal consumer protection law.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center filed its complaint with the Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday, just days after Google altered the service to address mounting privacy concerns.
Since launching Google Buzz as part of Gmail a week ago, the search company has come under fire for automatically creating public circles of friends for users based on their most frequent Gmail contacts.
Over the weekend, Google changed the service to merely suggest contacts for its users’ social networks.
Despite the changes, EPIC is calling the feature “a significant breach of consumers’ expectations of privacy.”
