Feb
18
Class Action Lawsuit filed in San Jose over Google Buzz
“F*ck You, Google” ran viral through the tech world not too long ago. And Google (smartly) responded in haste. Have you read the post? Have you heard the chatter? It seems like the original blog post from author Harriet Jacobs has been made private, but Gizmodo has a copy.
Did you hear about the problems Google Buzz had when it first released? In a nutshell, privacy wasn’t a strong suit (pun not intended — har har har). In Harriet’s case, her abusive ex-husband (amongst many others) was automatically granted access to her Google Reader information. Since she had never created a Google profile or Buzz profile, there were no blocking options. Not cool, Google.
Well, the story spread quickly. Techmeme picked it up, as did many other popular tech news sites. It wasn’t much later that Google responded to Harriet’s outrage saying “her report helped us discover one bug and one product issue in Google Reader.” Read more of their response at Business Insider. Lifehacker also reported today that as “recently promised, Google has updated Gmail to include a ‘Buzz’ tab.” Users are now able to disable Google Buzz and banish it from sight (or site — har har har, I’m on a roll today!) of Gmail.
So, the latest news regarding all this hubbub? A local class action lawsuit has been filed in San Jose federal court against Google. Filed just yesterday on behalf of Florida woman Eva Hibnick, the complaint alleges Google “broke the law when its controversial Google Buzz service shared personal data without the consent of users,” according to the SFGate. Since Hibnick is filing on behalf of all Gmail users that were linked to Buzz, that could mean 31.2 million people against Google. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1984 is served up as an example of one law Google broke in regards to the complaint.
Google doesn’t really have much to comment yet. “We haven’t yet been served, so we can’t comment on the suit until we’ve had a chance to review it.”
