Trade commissioner criticizes Buzz and Facebook
A Federal Trade Commission member has accused Google of acting irresponsibly over the launch of its social networking tool Buzz. Pamela Jones Harbour said she believed privacy concerns played very little role in Google’s strategy for the launch.
Harbour, who will be leaving her role as a commissioner next month, was speaking at an FTC “roundtable” event in Washington, D.C., the third in a series title “exploring privacy” and including participants from online businesses and consumer groups.
PC World reports that Harbour argued that tech companies are taking an attitude to privacy which largely comes down to doing whatever they feel like and waiting to see if anyone then tries to stop them. She said the commission needed to take a tougher line to make sure companies take privacy into account before they act.
Regarding Google, she noted that the firm asks the public to trust them but that ” based on my observations, I do not believe consumer privacy played any significant role in the release of Buzz.” In her mind, the launch of Buzz, and the way it was automatically integrated into Gmail, was a significant change in the relationship between Gmail and its users.
Harbour also criticized Facebook over its recent privacy changes which set much profile information to be public by default. And she lamented the fact that many social networking and e-mail services don’t automatically encrypt data passing to and from customers, arguing that this is needed to protect personal data that may be transmitted over public Wi-Fi networks.
The comments follow criticisms of both social networking sites by a Microsoft researcher. Danah Boyd said Buzz’s problems were down to social rather than technical misjudgments, while Facebook was wrong in assuming that the 65 percent of people who left their entire profiles publicly available had made a conscious decision to do so.
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