Global privacy officials gang up on Google

Data protection officials argue that Google needs to take user privacy more seriously

Privacy and data protection authorities from around the world are scheduled to meet in Washington DC later today to share their growing concerns about Google's privacy practices.

The meeting follows a letter (PDF) sent yesterday to Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, calling on the search firm to set a better example on privacy to other online companies.

The meeting will be attended by privacy officials from Canada, France, Israel, The Netherlands and Spain, and has been supported by groups in Germany, Italy, Ireland, New Zealand and the UK.

"We are increasingly concerned that, too often, the privacy rights of the world's citizens are being forgotten as Google rolls out new technological applications," noted the letter.

"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."

Buzz was launched in early February to allow Gmail users to share real-time updates in a similar way to Twitter. However, Google integrated Gmail users into the social network without their consent, and had already selected the Gmail accounts that users would follow based on their most frequent contacts.

To make matters worse, all this information was made public, and Google had to revisit its privacy settings after receiving an avalanche of complaints.