San Francisco/New York, Feb 14 (AP): Google introduced Buzz — its answer to Facebook and Twitter — it hoped to get the service off to a fast start. 

However, Google’s decision to use e-mail and chat as basis of social network was unfair and deceptive, critics claimed for what Google viewed as an obvious shortcut stirred up a beehive of angry protests. Many users bristled at what they considered invasion of privacy, and they faulted Google for failing to ask permission before sharing a person’s Buzz contacts with a broad audience. Google has faced firestorm of criticism on blogs and Web sites.

Faced with this onslaught of diatribe, Google quickly learned that people’s most frequent e-mail contacts are not necessarily their best friends. Rather, they could be business associates, or even lovers, and groups don’t necessarily mix well. It’s one reason many people keep those worlds separate by using Facebook for friends and LinkedIn for professional contacts, or by keeping some people completely off either social circle despite frequent e-mails with them.

More control

Google Inc drew privacy complaints when it introduced Buzz and automatically created circles of friends based on users’ most frequent contacts on Gmail. Google responded by giving users more control over what others see about them. For, e-mail, it turns out, can hold many secrets, from names of personal physicians and illicit lovers to identities of whistle-blowers and anti-government activists. Google, recently a hero for threatening to leave China, found itself being pilloried as clumsy violator of privacy. In an e-mail message, Todd Jackson, Product Manager for Gmail and Google Buzz, said defended the setup of Buzz service. He said Buzz came with built-in circle of contacts to provide better experience to users and that many liked that feature. He said it was very easy for users to edit who they were following on the service and who could follow them. He also said anyone could hide their list of Buzz contacts with a single click.

After numerous bloggers complained that privacy controls were difficult to find and adjust, Google’s Jackson said the company had made it easier for people to hide their Buzz contacts and block followers whose identity was unknown.

But critics said Google’s decision to use e-mail and chat correspondence as basis of a social network was fundamentally misguided. While it is common for social networks to make public a person’s list of friends and followers, those lists are not typically created from e-mail conversations.

Electronic Privacy Information Centre Executive Director Marc Rotenberg said “e-mail is one of the few things that people understand to be private,” adding his organisation planned to file a complaint with Federal Trade Commission claiming that Google’s use of e-mail conversations to build social network was unfair and deceptive.

In an expletive-laden article, a blogger complained that Google had made her fearful. She said she had unexpectedly discovered a list of people, which may have included her abusive ex-husband or people who sent hostile comments to her blog, following her and her comments on Google Reader, a service for reading blogs and automated news feeds.  To contain fallout, Google made changes to enhance privacy of shared comments on Google Reader.

Some privacy experts said that Google had made matters worse by making it difficult for people to hide their lists of Buzz contacts after they realised that those lists had been made public. Some users assumed that they could simply turn off Buzz service, but that proved inadequate. Google is known for releasing new products before they are fully ready and then improving them over time.