Google bosses may not be particularly concerned about protecting privacy—except when it comes to stripper parties hosted by a top engineer. Online party pics were strictly verboten by engineer Orkut Büyükkökten, who hosted male and female strippers at a billionaire-studded fete in his San Francisco penthouse that included Google co-founder Sergey Brin, reports Gawker. Oops but your privacy not so much...

Here is the Google story...

Google privacy counsel Mike Yang — privacy counsel are in-house Google attorneys who consult on privacy issues during product development — and Google’s head privacy engineer Alma Whitten were present. Yang described a process in which privacy counsel get involved “fairly early” in product development to flag potential issues and concerns. He said that this process has been in place at Google for “at least five years.” The process sounded to me pretty coherent and thoughtful. How then, in the words of one of the reporters present, did “Google get it so wrong with Buzz.”

Yang defended the decisions that the product team made about the “opt-out” configuration of Buzz at launch. He also said that Google had been using the product internally for months before launch without incident or concern.

He admitted that while internal Google users didn’t have concerns about privacy with the product that the company failed to fully appreciate the wide range of differing privacy expectations that Buzz (within Gmail) would confront at launch.

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