San Francisco — Enjoy it or ency it, Google Buzz has dominated tech headlines since its launch last week. A Florida woman on Wednesday filed a class-action lawsuit against Google’s latest real-time social network tool, “Google Buzz,” accusing that the new Buzz violates the privacy rights of Gmail.
Law firms in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., Wednesday chasing the latest product unveiled by the Mountain View tech giant, Google Buzz, filed a class-action lawsuit in San Jose, Calif., federal court against Google, and its Buzz technology, on behalf of Eva Hibnick, a 24-year-old Harvard Law School student.
Lawyers filed the case on behalf of all Gmail users whose accounts were automatically linked to Buzz, a service similar to Facebook or Twitter, allows users post status updates, YouTube videos and photos, connecting users in an ongoing online conversation.
Eva Hibnick, a resident of Sarasota County, Fla., lodged the complain in a San Jose, Calif., federal court on behalf of herself and the approximately 31 million U.S. users of Google’s popular Gmail e-mail service.
The lawsuit charges that Google Buzz, which automatically opted-in all Gmail users upon its launch, unlawfully shared personal data without users’ consent. The document quotes the Federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Federal Stored Communications Act and California common and statutory law.
“I feel like they did something wrong,” said Hibnick, an active Gmail user and second-year law student. “They opted me into this social network and I did not want it.”
Hibnick said she typically uses Gmail about two to three times a day, and when she signed in to the service Feb. 9 (the day of Google Buzz’s launch), she did not realize at first that she had been automatically signed up for the new social network.
When she realized later, she said she was concerned that Google Buzz had publicly disclosed her personal relationships.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin on hand for the launch of Google Buzz Photo: REUTERS
A Google spokesperson told The Telegraph: “We have not yet been served and would not be able to comment until we have had a chance to review the complaint.”
Although, ever since the issue arose, “Google has publicly acknowledged that its Buzz program presents privacy concerns, and Google has made several waves of modifications to the program. However, Google’s modifications do not go far enough to address the problem. Furthermore, Google’s actions have already caused damage because the Buzz program disclosed private user information the moment Google launched the service. The bell of breached privacy cannot be un-rung.”
Hibnick is seeking unspecified damages and is asking the court to prevent Google from offering Buzz without “appropriate safeguards, default provisions and opt-in mechanisms.”
However, barely two days after Google introduced the changes, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a watchdog group, filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission alleging the company had violated consumer protection laws.
EPIC wants the FTC to ensure that Google is barred from using Gmail address book contacts to compile social networking lists.
“This is a significant breach of consumers’ expectations of privacy,” EPIC Executive Director Marc Rotenberg said in a statement. “Google should not be allowed to push users’ personal information into a social network they never requested.”
In response to the EPIC complaint, Google said it already has made some changes to Buzz based on user feedback and has “more improvements in the works.”