Officials from Germany, Canada, France and seven other countries are raising privacy concerns to Google over the online search leader's fumbled foray into social networking. Google launched Google Buzz as part of its Gmail service in February. It quickly came under fire for automatically creating public circles of friends for users, based on their most frequent Gmail contacts. After complaints, the company apologized and made changes to the service. But in the letter sent Monday to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the officials said they are still “extremely concerned about how a product with such significant privacy issues was launched in the first place.” Google Street View is another area of concern, with officials saying the company launched the mapping service - which includes street-level photos taken by cameras mounted on cars sweeping through neighborhoods - without “due consideration of privacy and data protection laws and cultural norms.” The officials called on Google to create default settings that protect users' privacy and to ensure that privacy control settings are prominent and easy to use.”
