“People thought what they had was an address book for an e-mail program, and Google decided to turn that into a friends list for a new social network,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group in Washington. “E-mail is one of the few things that people understand to be private.”
Mr. Rotenberg said that his organization planned to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission claiming that the Google’s use of e-mail conversations to build a social network was unfair and deceptive. —NYT