Thaindian News

Washington, Mar 31 (ANI): The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has ordered independent privacy audits on Google for the next 20 years over charges that it “violated its own privacy promises”.

The BBC quoted FTC as saying that the search giant has wrongly used information from Google Mail users last year to create its social network Buzz.

It also said that Google had used “deceptive tactics” to populate the network with personal data gained from use of Gmail, and added that users were still enrolled in some of its features despite being given the option to opt-out of Buzz

It also said that for those that did decide to opt-in, the implications of that were not made clear to them, adding: “Google also offered a ‘Turn off Buzz’ option that did not fully remove the user from the social network.”

Meanwhile, Google said in a blog post that ‘Google Buzz fell short of our usual standards’.

“While we worked quickly to make improvements, regulators unsurprisingly wanted more detail about what went wrong and how we could prevent it from happening again. Today, we’ve reached an agreement with the FTC to address their concerns,” it added.

This agreement would reportedly require Google to undergo a privacy review once in every two years for the next 20 years.

FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz has urged Google to honour the privacy pledges, adding: “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.” (ANI)