Less than a week after Google introduced a new social networking service, Google Buzz, the company is working feverishly to address user unease about the privacy of the product.

Google Buzz lets users share posts and notes with people they are connected to or “follow,” a model similar to Twitter and Facebook. But unlike those services, it automatically signs users up to follow people they email and chat with the most through Gmail. It also makes that list of first followers public, by default. That decision has triggered a wave of complaints from users concerned the feature would inadvertently publicizing the names of people they frequently emailed with, like a spouse or ex-boyfriend.

The critics say that Google doesn’t understand that some people don’t want their email contacts to become their social networking contacts, period.

“Users’ are being enticed to accept Buzz without fully understanding that the email address book is becoming their friends list,” says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Rotenberg says EPIC plans to file a complaint Tuesday to the Federal Trade Commission, arguing that by blending the two – namely, treating users’ email contacts as social networking contacts – Google is guilty of “unfair and deceptive trade practices.”

Rotenberg called it a rare miscalculation for Google, which he said has been conscientious about giving users control over their privacy. “Google has generally been pretty savvy” about privacy considerations while rolling out new products, he said. “And still, they blundered big time.”

In an interview Friday, Google product manager Todd Jackson, said the Google Buzz product isn’t set in stone and that the company is working on new features, some of which will address privacy concerns. “It’s still early, and we have a long list of improvements on the way,” he said, declining to go into detail. “We look forward to hearing more suggestions and will continue to improve the Buzz experience with user transparency and control top of mind.”

“Giving our users choice and control over their information is very important to us,” said Jackson, who declined to comment about the possible EPIC complaint.

Google has already made some changes. On Thursday, the company made the option to hide the people you are “following” more prominent – helping users keep names of close contacts — whom Buzz may have signed them up to “follow” automatically — hidden if they want to. A complete list of the changes can be found here.

When asked why the company didn’t include these modifications initially, Jackson said Google “thought about it really hard and went through multiple iterations on the design based on feedback from user research and Googlers.” The company decided to prepopulate some followers to make “the getting started experience” as seamless as possible “so that users wouldn’t have to manually peck out another social network entirely from scratch.” He said the company has gotten a lot of positive feedback about the feature.

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