A Harvard Law School student has filed a class action lawsuit against Google for Buzz’s privacy violations. The student, Eva Hibnick, says “I feel like they did something wrong,” which is surely true but probably not her best lede. “The document cites the Federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Federal Stored Communications Act and California common and statutory law,” says ABC News. The kitchen sink, in other words.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center has already complained to the Federal Trade Commission (see here for EPIC’s press release, with a link to the complaint itself). This lawsuit seems like overkill, no matter how mad people are, given the risks we’ve written about elsewhere of stretching any available law to make a club with which to attack a technological innovation.

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I was on the Callie Crossley Show on WGBH radio in Boston yesterday giving Google a piece of my mind about Buzz. But I was gentle compared to Callie herself. You can hear the short segment here.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 19th, 2010 at 8:29 am and is filed under Privacy, Social computing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.