Google’s pissed off Canada: commissioner to investigate Buzz

The Canadian Privacy Commissioner is now investigating if Google violated more than just users trust when it threw the switch to turn Google Buzz on for everyone. The Commissioner is actively pursuing Google and was in talks with the company over the weekend regarding Buzz and the privacy concerns of Canadians. Buzz is increasingly becoming more of an eyesore for Google.

Our Shawn Ingram noted, ” Buzz at first glance comes off as a bit of a Twitter-clone built into Gmail. It’s a service for sharing short messages, photos and videos with your friends. Of course, unlike Twitter and Facebook, there’s theoretically a way to automatically include everyone as it just takes your friends from Google Contacts. Buzz makes it possible to link to other web services like Picasa, Flickr, Twitter and Google Reader, which looks to be a nice feature. ”

Privacy concerns erupted as soon as Buzz was turned on. Instantly, Buzz added users most popular contacts as followers, inadvertently adding good with bad. Many complained this was not the way to build a social network. Now, Buzz has caught the interest of the Privacy Commissioner.

Google Canada spokesperson, Wendy Rozeluk, commented, “we’ll be making some significant product improvements over the next few days based on user feedback,” she said. “The user always comes first.”

Canada’s Privacy Commissioner has been active with social networking sites like Facebook, recently forcing the site to modify some of its practices.

Read: [CBC News]