Google has settled with the Federal Trade Commission over charges that Google Buzz violated user privacy and used deceptive tactics to get people using the service. Both parties acknowledged the agreement on Wednesday morning, with Google noting that the Buzz launch "fell short of our usual standards for transparency and user control." As part of the settlement, Google has agreed to an independent review of its privacy practices every two years, and must get consent from users anytime its services change in a way that results in sharing more information.

When Google first launched Buzz, its social media/microblogging service, it immediately faced a barrage of privacy complaints from users. For one, Buzz attempted to auto-follow people who that particular user was known to converse with via Gmail, exposing some users' private accounts to people they definitely did not want to be associated with. (One story that got particular attention was from a woman who was e-hiding from her abusive ex-husband who didn't previously know how to find her).

Google also auto-associated users' public Picasa Web Albums and Google Reader shared items—although these things were already public, users weren't given the option to leave them unlinked from Buzz. Google attempted to move quickly and address some of these early complaints, but the company soon faced a class-action lawsuit over the privacy gaffes, as well as an FTC investigation.

More than a year later, Google and the FTC have agreed to settle. According to the FTC, Google's options for leaving or declining to participate in Buzz were "ineffective," and the controls for sharing personal information were difficult to find. The FTC said that Google violated its own privacy policies using the information it got from another service (Gmail) without obtaining user consent, and that the company essentially tricked users into joining Buzz.

Google is barred from misrepresenting privacy settings to its users and must now obtain consent before sharing information with third parties—including when Google makes any sort of change to its existing services. Google also must establish and maintain a "comprehensive privacy program" for the next 20 years. The Commission voted unanimously in favor of the settlement agreement.

"[W]e don’t always get everything right," Google's director of privacy Alma Whitten wrote on the company blog Wednesday. "We’d like to apologize again for the mistakes we made with Buzz. While today’s announcement thankfully puts this incident behind us, we are 100 percent focused on ensuring that our new privacy procedures effectively protect the interests of all our users going forward.