Buzz is less than a month old and has already got itself into trouble regarding privacy issues. The controversial “auto-follow” which Google called “auto-suggest” means that Buzz automatically sets you up to follow the people you email and chat with the most. This is great if you email people who are your friends, but you don’t want to follow work colleagues or your boss, who you also have to email on a regular basis.

However, Google are now serving its ads with other people’s content. This means that Buzz republishes the content, the full article, not just parts of it, in Gmail without asking permission. Apparently it also strips advertising from that content serving Google ads so this means people are losing money. There was an interesting post on Econsultancy’s website which goes into greater detail according to one blogger’s experience.

So it seems that Google’s attempt to try and spread itself into social media has not got off to a good start. On the plus side though, the location-based features in Google Buzz for mobile seems great. Buzz updates is not limited to 140 characters like Twitter.

I will be monitoring Google Buzz over the coming months and will update this post to reflect the news.