Google Buzz vs. Privacy, again

The New York Times has published an article documenting the criticism that Google Buzz has received from privacy advocates:

Many users bristled at what they considered an invasion of privacy, and they faulted the company for failing to ask permission before sharing a person’s Buzz contacts with a broad audience. For the last three days, Google has faced a firestorm of criticism on blogs and Web sites, and it has already been forced to alter some features of the service.

E-mail, it turns out, can hold many secrets, from the names of personal physicians and illicit lovers to the identities of whistle-blowers and antigovernment activists. And Google, so recently a hero to many people for threatening to leave China after hacking attempts against the Gmail accounts of human rights activists, now finds itself being pilloried as a clumsy violator of privacy…

“People thought what they had was an address book for an e-mail program, and Google decided to turn that into a friends list for a new social network,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group in Washington. “E-mail is one of the few things that people understand to be private.”

Mr. Rotenberg said that his organization planned to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission claiming that the Google’s use of e-mail conversations to build a social network was unfair and deceptive.

So much for not doing any evil.  That may be a harsh judgment, considering that anyone can make mistakes.  However, if the roll-out of Buzz and the fact that it makes your most common e-mail contacts public by default was an honest mistake by honest people, Google could do a better job of owning up to its mistakes.