8.5 Million Reasons Why You Should Care About Your Privacy Policy

You may have heard about an internet company called Google. Well, Google decided to release a social networking application in February 2010. The application was called Google Buzz.

Google Buzz was designed to allow users to post updates, photos, videos and more. One of the goals was to compete with Facebook. The application was tied into Google's popular email service, Gmail. The problem came with Google's roll out of the product.

Since Buzz was tied into Gmail, Google decided to promote this to Gmail users when they log into their email accounts. However, users were automatically opted-in to Google Buzz without knowing it. In essence, they were automatically signed up when they used their Gmail accounts.

After users were automatically signed up with Google Buzz, Google used the email address books of the members to share information with all of those people. All of a sudden, people were sharing, or following, people that they may not have spoken with in months, and may not want to speak with.

Of course, when you are a multi-billion dollar company and you share private information with the world, without permission, that is bound to make some people angry.

A lawsuit was filed in federal court in San Jose, California. The class action lawsuit representative was a Harvard law student that had talked to a professor about what Google was doing. The professor put her in touch with an attorney that could handle the case.

Several months later, and the lawsuit is now in the process of being settled for $8.5 million dollars. The final step is to get court approval of the settlement, which is currently scheduled for December 2010.

There are a few lessons to learn from Google's $8.5 million dollar mistake. First, opt-in versus opt-out makes a huge difference. This should've been obvious to Google if they had not forgotten Facebook's privacy problems so easily. People are very sensitive about being forced into a program or service. Even if they would ultimately join of their own free will, it needs to be their decision.

Another lesson learned is respect the privacy policy. A privacy policy is designed to disclose the types of information you collect from users, how you collect that information, what you do with that information and so on and so forth. But, remember, it serves a purpose and YOU are also bound by the terms of your privacy policy. Do not put a privacy policy up that you can't live up to. Otherwise, your company could be the one settling a major lawsuit.

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