Ten Nations Press Google to Better Protect Privacy

In another sign of concern over Google's growing Internet clout, privacy officials from 10 nations sent a letter to CEO Eric Schmidt demanding that the company do more to protect privacy.

The letter argued that Google has given short shrift to privacy rights as it rolls out new technologies.

We were disturbed by your recent rollout of the Google Buzz social networking application, which betrayed a disappointing disregard for fundamental privacy norms and laws. Moreover, this was not the first time you have failed to take adequate account of privacy considerations when launching new services. The privacy problems associated with your initial global rollout of Google Buzz on February 9, 2010 were serious and ought to have been readily apparent to you.

In essence, you took Google Mail (Gmail), a private, one-to-one web-based e-mail service, and converted it into a social networking service, raising concern among users that their personal information was being disclosed. Google automatically assigned users a network of "followers" from among people with whom they corresponded most often on Gmail, without adequately informing Gmail users about how this new service would work or providing sufficient information to permit informed consent decisions. This violated the fundamental principle that individuals should be able to control the use of their personal information.

The letter was sent out by the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Jennifer Stoddart, as well as the heads of the data protection authorities in France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain and the United Kingdom.

Google sent CNET a statement saying:

We try very hard to be upfront about the data we collect, and how we use it, as well as to build meaningful controls into our products. Google Dashboard, the Ads Preferences Manager and our data liberation initiative are all good examples of such initiatives. Of course we do not get everything 100 percent right--that is why we acted so quickly on Buzz following the user feedback we received. We have discussed all these issues publicly many times before and have nothing to add to today's letter--instead we are focused on launching our new transparency tool which we are very excited about.