“People are surprised that Google treated a private [e-mail] contact list as a public ‘friends’ list,” said Marc Rotenberg, head of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. He said that the list should not automatically be made public, and that he would lodge a Federal Trade Commission complaint next week. In a blog post on Thursday evening, Google said it was making changes to Buzz deal with this issue. These included making it easier for users to change their privacy settings to limit who can see their personal lists of contacts. However, the contact lists will still be public by default until changes are made, and it was unclear whether the concessions would do enough to quiet the critics.
