New Gmail feature draws ire of privacy advocates

A new feature in Google's email service Gmail has raised the hackles of privacy advocates. The feature lets Google+ users send people emails even if they do not know their email address.

"Have you ever started typing an email to someone only to realise halfway through the draft that you haven't actually exchanged email addresses? If you are nodding your head 'yes' and already have a Google+ profile, then you're in luck, because now it's easier for people using Gmail and Google+ to connect over email," Google product manager David Nachum wrote in a blog post. "As an extension of some earlier improvements that keep Gmail contacts automatically up-to-date using Google+, Gmail will suggest your Google+ connections as recipients when you are composing a new email."

According to Google, email addresses of people are not visible to Google+ connections unless they send that person an email and vice versa.

The new feature forms part of a broader initiative to commingle Google+ with Google's other services. The 2 1/2-year-old social network boasts of 540 million active users. People automatically get a Google+ account when they sign up for Gmail.

According to Google, the new feature would make it easier for people who used both services to communicate with their friends.

Google said users who did not wish to receive email messages from other people on Google+ could switch the settings so that they received messages only from people they had added to their networks of friends or from no one at all.

According to some privacy advocates, the company should have made the new feature "opt-in," so as to get an explicit agreement from users to receive messages from other Google+ users, rather than requiring manual change of setting.

According to Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the non-profit Electronic Privacy Information Center, the new feature was "troubling."

He said there was a strong echo of the Google Buzz snafu, referring to a social networking service that Google launched in 2010. The service initially used its Gmail users' contact lists to create social networks that the rest of the world could see, which led to an uproar and ultimately a settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission.

Google claims the new feature would not expose the email addresses of any Google+ users to strangers. Emails from strangers on Google+ would end up in a special section within the recipient's mailbox that was separate from messages from friends and other contacts. If the message was not replied to by the recipient future messages from the person would be blocked by Gmail.