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Google did not fully test Buzz, because they wanted to rush their Twitter competitor out the door. Big mistake. There have been complaints that ex lovers and stalkers have refound their victims. The rest of this article is borrowed from the BBC:

The firm has had to make a series of changes to the service after a ferocious backlash from users concerned about intrusions of privacy.

The BBC understands that Buzz was only tested internally and bypassed more extensive trials with external testers – used for many other Google services.

Google said that it was now working “extremely hard” to fix the problems.

“We’re very early in this space. This was one of our first big attempts,” Todd Jackson, Buzz product manager, told BBC News.

“We’ve been testing Buzz internally at Google for a while. Of course, getting feedback from 20,000 Googlers isn’t quite the same as letting Gmail users play with Buzz in the wild.”

Many of the firm’s new services are tested by the so-called Google Trusted Tester program, a network of friends and family of Google employees who are given confidential access to products before they launch.

Buzz was not tested by this program.

The firm has now set up a “war room” at Google HQ to bring together engineers and product managers to make decisions about what changes need to be made to Buzz.

“If it becomes clear that people don’t think we’ve done enough, we’ll make more changes,” said Mr Jackson.

He acknowledged that many of the networks “tens of millions” of users were “rightfully upset” and that the firm was “very, very sorry”.

“We know we need to improve things.”

Privacy priorities

Buzz was launched on 9 February. The service, which is integrated with Gmail, allows users to post status updates, share content and read and comment on friends’ posts.

One problem that immediately caused concern was Google’s decision to automatically give users a ready-made circle of friends based on the people they most frequently e-mailed.
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The launch was widely seen as a challenge to Facebook

Unless users changed settings in their profile, this list could automatically be made public, allowing anyone to see who a user corresponded with most frequently.

Mr Jackson told BBC News that the decision to create these automatic lists was borne out of the idea that Google “wanted to provide a great user experience straight out of the box”.

But privacy experts immediately pointed out this could cause problems for journalists, businesses or even people having an illicit affair.

Evgeny Morozov, a Belarus-born researcher and blogger who looks at the political implications of the internet, also raised concerns.

“If I were working for the Iranian or the Chinese government, I would immediately dispatch my internet geek squads to check on Google Buzz accounts for political activists and see if they have any connections that were previously unknown to the government,” he wrote

As a result of complaints, Google said Buzz would now only suggest people who a user might want to be friends with.

The company has also announced steps to make it easier to disable Buzz altogether and to ensure that people’s accounts do not automatically connect with online Picasa photo albums and items that people may store in their Google Reader accounts.

The changes were in part thrashed out at a company-wide meeting on 12 February at Google headquarters.

“We realize that we didn’t get things quite right – we’re working extremely hard to fix this,” said Mr Jackson.

He said that “transparency and control” were “top priorities” and that users would “continue to see improvements”.

Code challenge

Other possible changes include a better “preferences menu” that will allow users to better tailor what appears in their inbox, and a more prominent “mute” option to switch the service off.

Another idea, said Mr Jackson, was to create a separate service that was not part of Gmail.

“We think that integration with Gmail was absolutely the right way to go – we wanted to make Buzz easily accessible to people,” he said.

“We also want to give people who don’t use Gmail the ability to use Buzz, so we’re exploring the idea of offering a separate destination site.”

The most recently announced changes would go live “this week”, he added.

“We worked around the clock to make the code changes for these improvements; now we’re putting them through a full testing process to identify any bugs and translating them into 53 languages so they reach all Gmail users.”

Asked if the Google founders – Larry Page and Sergey Brin – or any of the executive team would issue an apology for breaching their user’s trust, a Google spokesperson said: “Google has apologised – we’re very sorry for the concern we caused.”

Todd Jackson, product manager for Gmail & Google Buzz, wrote in a blog post on Saturday that Google had decided to adjust one of the most-criticized features in Buzz: the ready-made circle of friends the service provided to new users based on their most frequent e-mail & chat contacts in Gmail. In lieu of automatically connecting people, Buzz will in the future merely suggest to new users a group of people they may need to follow or be followed by, they said.

Google moved quickly over the weekend to try to contain mounting criticism of Buzz, its social network, apologizing to users for features that were widely seen as endangering privacy & announcing product changes to address those concerns.
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“We’re sorry for the concern we’ve caused & have been working hard ever since to improve things based on your feedback,” Mr. Jackson wrote. “We’ll continue to do so.”

Mr. Jackson, who said that the auto-follow feature had been intended to make it easy for people to get started on Buzz, acknowledged the criticism that was heaped on Google in the last few days.

Some critics said the latest modifications to Buzz, which is tightly coupled with Gmail, appeared to have addressed the most serious privacy concern.

The start-up technique for Buzz, which Google introduced on Tuesday as its answer to Facebook & Twitter, drew angry responses on technology blogs & beyond, as users feared that the names of their e-mail correspondents would be publicly exposed. A first set of changes that Google announced on Thursday failed to suppress the uproar.

“Turning off the auto-follow was a gigantic improvement,” Danny Sullivan, a longtime Google analyst & the editor of SearchEngineLand, said in an e-mail message.

But Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said his organization still intended to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission this week pending its review of Google’s changes.

The privacy concerns about Buzz, & Google’s fast efforts to address its critics, echo episodes that have bedeviled other social networks, most notably Facebook. None of those events have slowed the growth of Facebook, which recently said it had reached over 400 million users. Gmail has 176 million users, according to the research firm comScore.

“Even with these changes, there is still the concern that Gmail users are being driven in to a social networking service that they didn’t sign up for,” Mr. Rotenberg said in an interview on Sunday.

The alter in the start-up technique for new users of Buzz was the most significant of a series of modifications that Mr. Jackson announced on Saturday.

“I think the privacy issues earlier this week with Buzz will blow over & not harm the product in the long term,” Mr. Sullivan said. But privacy will continue to haunt Google, they said, & plenty of people will point to the release of Buzz as an overreach by Google & a reason that the company could not be trusted.

Google also said that it would generate a new Buzz tab in Gmail’s settings page to permit users to hide Buzz from Gmail . The page gives users the option to disable Buzz, deleting their posts & removing their Google profile, which in plenty of cases listed publicly their circle of contacts in Buzz. The new feature could address concerns that disabling Buzz & removing a public profile was a multistep technique that confused plenty of users & that some described as a game of whack-a-mole.

Google also will no longer automatically connect public Picasa albums & items shared on Google Reader, another feature that had been widely criticized by some users & privacy advocates.

The changes Google announced on Saturday will be carried out in the next few days.

In the next one weeks, existing Buzz users will be directed to the new start-up technique to give them a “second chance to review & confirm” the people they are following, Mr. Jackson said.

While it is early to gauge Buzz’s success, Google said tens of millions of people had tried the service in its first 48 hours.

Mr. Sullivan of SearchEngineLand said that the level of activity on Buzz appeared to be significant.

“I suspect Google might have a minor hit on its hands already,” they said.