Related headlines

TalkTalk remains coy on compensation commitments

Wi-fi slow? Get rid of the baby monitor!

Spectrum caps on 4G network ‘unfair’, mobile giant claims

Satellite broadband viable option for rural areas

Rate your broadband service!

Happy with broadband? Or is it letting you down?
Rate your broadband ISP here >>

Google Buzz criticised over privacy issues

Google’s latest offering to the social networking arena, Buzz, has raised concerns over its failure to protect users’ privacy.

The service, directly integrated with G-Mail, allows users to “follow” the people they email and chat to most regularly. However, as the default settings of Buzz accounts are set to public, this information is initially openly available to all other service users.

The flaw was flagged up on Wednesday, just a day after Buzz’s launch. “Imagine a wife discovering a husband emails and chats to his old girlfriends,” pointed out business news site, The Silicon Alley Insider.

Although users are able to edit their privacy settings once their account is created, there is still concern over the initial display of private information.

Google spokespersons have made no comment on the issue.

As well as the Twitter-style following feature, Buzz also possesses a wide range of other social networking capabilities including the facility to post status updates and comments and share content such as photos.

In a bid to set itself apart from rivals Facebook and MySpace, Buzz is also fitted with a number of unique features such as recommending content it thinks individual users may like and incorporating it directly into their content stream.

Bradley Horowitz, Google’s vice president of product marketing, said: “We’re launching this today because we’re just getting started. There’s so much opportunity, we can wire this up in so many ways to other parts of Google,  other parts of the internet.”

Buzz is not Google’s first venture onto the social networking scene – it launched Orkut in 2004. However, while enjoying popularity in some countries such as Brazil and India, the site has been overshadowed by its competitors elsewhere.

Facebook is currently the most popular social networking site, with over 400 million users worldwide. Former social leader, MySpace and internet upstart, Twitter take the runner up spots.

It is estimated that social networking accounts for 11% of all time spent online.