Google gets 20-year privacy watch as US flays them for 'deception' over Buzz
The internet giant took it on the chin - and apologised yesterday - after the US accused the company of blunders over Buzz
The internet giant agreed to the terms to settle a series of complaints by the commission. The penalty was described by the San Jose Mercury News as "a strong punitive action that is a first in the federal agency's history."
FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said on the agency's website, "When companies make privacy pledges, they need to honour them. This is a tough settlement that ensures that Google will honor its commitments to consumers and build strong privacy protections into all of its operations."Buzz was based on Google's Gmail service. Users believed that they could choose to join or not - but the FTC said, the options for declining or leaving the social network were ineffective.
The controls for limiting the sharing of their personal information on Buzz were confusing and difficult to find, said the agency.
The FTC said Google:
FAILED to disclose adequately that consumers' frequent email contacts would become public by default.
MISREPRESENTED that it was treating personal information from the European Union in accordance with the U.S.-EU SafeHarbour privacy framework. This is a voluntary programme administered by the U.S. Department of Commerce and the EC.
The FTC launched their probe after a complaint from the Electronic Privacy Information Centre shortly after Buzz started.
In a company blog post, Google apologised for "the mistakes" the company made with Buzz.
"The launch of Google Buzz fell short of our usual standards for transparency and user control -- letting our users and Google down," the company said.
"While today's announcement thankfully puts this incident behind us, we are 100 percent focused on ensuring that our new privacy procedures effectively protect the interests of all our users going forward."
Google said it would allow an independent review of its privacy procedures once every two years.