Buzz Up Before the Beak!

Made Essential Reading on 22 February 2010 Lee Lomas

Google is facing a law suit in the USA over breach of privacy laws in connection with the launch of its Google Buzz service. We all know that the USA is litigious in the extreme and I’m sure you could name your own favourite in the pantheon of ridiculous law suits. A personal favourite is still the house of the Golden Arches being sued for serving hot coffee! Bonkers.

In essence, Google didn’t ask if its 176 million Gmail users wanted Buzz and rolled it out to everyone irrespective. This turned their email service into a social network overnight and automatically gave users an immediate circle of friends to follow based on those people that they had emailed the most.

They have faced an avalanche of criticism from privacy campaigners who say that this has opened up the contact list of individuals for general viewing and has potentially serious consequences for those with a sensitive contact list. The Google Buzz product manager Todd Jackson says the firm is “very, very sorry” (maybe Tiger Woods borrowed this script for his press statement!).

Will this do lasting damage to Google which, let’s face it has been sweeping all before it in a very Microsoft fashion? I’m not sure. It will depend on how well they do at fixing the issues and how quickly but there are two things that immediately spring to mind.

1. 1. They are a huge IT company and totally lost the archetypal IT mindset of testing, testing and more testing. They played with Buzz amongst themselves but didn’t open it up to a wider community which may have pointed out the potential pitfalls.
2. 2. If your customers have signed up for one thing – it is not the done thing to change the deal and give them something else entirely without their permission.

We shall see whether or not the law suit amounts to anything and it will be interesting to see how Google handle the PR issues over the coming weeks and months.