Google pays 8.5 million to settle class action lawsuit

Google’s Buzz is a controversial piece of technology. It was launched in May 2010 as a social networking and messaging program, and many have said that it was a copy of Twitter. It can be used for sharing links, pictures and videos, they can set status messages and the comments can be organized as conversations – features that Twitter does not have.

Buzz is a successful application, although not as successful as Twitter. In the first 56 hours of its release, Buzz has transmitted over 9 million posts. But as no new services are perfect, Buzz had its issues, especially those related to the users’ privacy.

One of the “features” of Buzz was especially criticized: the names of the most frequently e-mailed or chatted contracts from a user’s contact list are publicly disclosed on the user’s Google profile. This feature can be disabled, but those who fail to do so may disclose sensitive information about themselves or their contacts without knowing.

A student at Harvard Law School has filed a class action lawsuit against Google, claiming that the service has violated several federal privacy protection laws. Google has decided to settle the lawsuit, offering to pay $8.5 million for settlement and attorney fees. If the settlement is approved by the federal court of San Jose, California.