Google Tweaks Buzz After Overblown Privacy Backlash

From Ryan Singel in the Wired blog Epicenter:

Google is quickly making changes to its new social networking service Buzz — built on the back of its popular Gmail service — as a complaint to federal regulators follows a populist privacy backlash over the past week.

Google admitted to rare gaff in its rollout of Buzz last week, responding nimbly to a populist outcry by users who thought the social media service add-on to Gmail violated their privacy by outing who they often communicated with. A privacy group has already filed a complaint with U.S. regulators, and Canada’s privacy commissioner says she’s already looking into it.

But in the grand scheme of privacy invasions, this one ranks a “Grenada” — even though it has provided some cautionary lessons — not the least of which that Google shouldn’t limit pre-release testing to its unrepresentative army of coders.