Akhir 25, 1432 H/March 30, 2011, SPA -- Google will undergo privacy audits for the next 20 years under the terms of a settlement announced Wednesday by the Federal Trade Commission over the company's widely criticized Buzz social networking application, dpa reported. "The proposed settlement bars the company from future privacy misrepresentations, requires it to implement a comprehensive privacy programme, and calls for regular, independent privacy audits for the next 20 years," the FTC said in a statement. "This is the first time an FTC settlement order has required a company to implement a comprehensive privacy programme to protect the privacy of consumers' information." According to the FTC, Google violated privacy standards when it introduced Buzz to users of its Gmail email service last year by partially enrolling people even if they clicked an option declining the new service. Google also misrepresented that it was abiding by the terms of European Union privacy controls, and failed to inform Buzz users that their most-emailed contacts would be made public on the Buzz social network. "When companies make privacy pledges, they need to honour them," said Jon Leibowitz, chairman of the FTC. "This is a tough settlement that ensures that Google will honour its commitments to consumers and build strong privacy protections into all of its operations." The FTC launched an investigation into Google following thousands of protests by consumers and an official complaint by the Electronic Privacy Information Centre. In a company blog post Wednesday, Google apologized for "the mistakes" it made with Buzz. "The launch of Google Buzz fell short of our usual standards for transparency and user control - letting our users and Google down," the company said. "While today's announcement thankfully puts this incident behind us, we are 100 per cent focused on ensuring that our new privacy procedures effectively protect the interests of all our users going forward."
