How could Google have got it so wrong? The publicity in these early days of its new social media tool Buzz is getting worse by the day and Google need to wash their mouth out and learn from it.

I was talking the other day to some Google workers who were raving about their other recent email social innovation, Google Wave, which is no longer getting much hype beyond the Googleplex.

They said workers have been trialling it out weeks before it was made public and really loved it.  They imagined everyone Out There was Waving. They seemed bewildered when I said everyone I knew had stopped using it and found it either too ahead of its time or not very practical for them right now. They said that wasn’t the feeling inside Google, where it was being used to share stuff. Maybe what goes on at Google should stay inside Google.

It was one of those old 1996 spammer tricks where you get signed up for something before you realised or by clicking something it had infected your computer with a porn dialer.

The workers need to get out more. When Google launched Buzz, it seemed oblivious to the obvious privacy issues that it presented. It just landed in people’s email and only if you happened to scroll down to the very bottom of your inbox where you normally find copyright/disclaimer footnotes would you have found that Buzz was automatically turned on and you had to click there to turn it off.

It was one of those old 1996 spammer tricks where you get signed up for something before you realised or by clicking something it had infected your computer with a porn dialer.

Now the headlines just get worse. LA Times today heads their cautionary story: ”Google Buzz may put children at risk, parents fear” - and numerous other blogs and stories around the net today tell how parents discovered their children were using it even though somewhere in the fine print in Gmail is an age restriction for the email’s use.

Once again, there is no obvious mechanism to check age before using Buzz.

And who knows what dodgy people are buzzing your kids.

And now numerous papers and magazines are warning “Watch out: Spammers aim at Google Buzz.”

Today’s PC World notes that it took only two days for spammers to discover Buzz. Shocking.

Already well-known privacy groups are considering or laying complaints.

The Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center, which does good work, has asked the FTC to investigate whether Buzz violates federal privacy laws.

The chief executive of Google, Eric Schmidt, sounds like another arrogant corporation when he seems to blames problems on people being stupid.

Good move, Eric. That’s really the way to win hearts and minds.

While he agrees it wasn’t explained well, he says the issues seem to have been created by people being confused.

Anyway, he says, nobody had been harmed by Buzz and that the problems were merely the result of poor communication.

Sorry Google, it’s not that easy to dismiss what’s happened – and what you missed.

Google seems to have forgotten how to treat customers in a scary age when privacy concerns are fully justified . Hasn’t Eric followed concerns about MySpace, facebook and the like over the last few years?

It’s not exactly a new thing that rules must be adhered to if companies are not going to do evil or make it easy for evil people to take advantage of their products.

It’s you, Google, who are the tardy ones  for launching a product that hasn’t been properly tested by your privacy team and then you stick your head in the sand when questions are asked about it and think it’s because, like Wave, we don’t get it.