Privacy Working Group

The U.K.-based Telegraph reported on April 21, 2010 that:

Google has repeatedly shown a “disappointing disregard” for safeguarding private information about its users, the privacy officials from 10 major countries have said.

Britain’s Information Commissioner Christopher Graham and equivalent officials from Canada, France, Germany and Italy were among the signatories to a letter to the search giant’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, which condemned the way the company has delivered both its Streetview mapping service and its Buzz product, which was conceived as a rival to social network Facebook.

The letter, organised by Canada’s Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart, calls on Google to lay out how it will meet concerns about its use of public data in the future, and says that it has “violated the fundamental principle that individuals should be able to control the use of their personal information”. The search giant has already acted to address a number of the points now raised in the letter, but said that it had no further statements to make on its privacy policies.

This comes on the heels of problems with Google’s Buzz network.  According to the Telegraph:

The launch of the Buzz network in February sparked an international wave of protests because it took information about email users’ most common correspondents and automatically built each individual a network of followers. This meant that links which people wished to keep private could immediately become public.

Google says it has rectified the problems but privacy advocates will be watching very closely as Google continues to expand it’s reach throughout the world.