So did anyone else just get the email from Google about a class action lawsuit over Buzz.

I think Buzz is totally worthless and have never used it but is it worth a lawsuit. Were people traumatized over the few days when you couldn't op out of it.

If you are that worried about privacy you shouldn't be using a free web based email service.

Can I sue anyone for unwillingly being made a part of this.

I'm tempted to opt out.

I mean what would happen if a big part of the class opted out. Would the reward the lawyers got be reduced by a pro-rated amount?

Doubt it but as always, IANAL. You'd probably just end up slightly reducing the payment to the various privacy organisations whilst the lawyers and people who filed the lawsuit get paid the same most probably large amount.

The number of random class action lawsuits is just stupid. I understand why they exist and it is a good reason but they mostly appear to be filed by people out to make money.

It might be fun to do this option.

http://www.buzzclassaction.com/faq#Q10

It would be fun to send a nasty letter saying why I do not want to be included. The thing with all the opt out options is it sounds like you are supposed to opt out if you are planning on being in another lawsuit. So if I opt out of this one I will probably get included in a different one

I wonder how many of these are started by law firms.

Virtually all of them.

Buzz was poorly thought out, completely botched at launch, had big privacy concerns, and was too tied-in with GMail and you Google profile. But there's one thing I liked about it: the Buzz layer on Google Maps.

That one thing is the only reason I wish Buzz had caught on. See, I'm often someplace where I wonder "hmm, there seems to be something going on over there. I wonder what it is!" I will sometimes search Twitter, but Twitter is atrocious at location stuff, so I frequently only end up narrowing it down to something like a 30 mile area. When Buzz launched, though, I could pull up Maps on my phone and see people who Buzzed about something going on in their location (the location feature was opt-in...at least I'm pretty sure it was).

But since then, any time I've checked, there's never anyone around me on Buzz. A couple months ago we heard these incredibly loud "BOOM!s" coming from somewhere south of us. It sounded almost like thunder but it wasn't, and we didn't see any fireworks in the sky. It went on for about 30 minutes, but nothing showed up on Buzz

The Buzz screw up was in a whole different league to the usual privacy fail. "Normally" they revolve around accidentally (or not) leaking some bit of data to a bunch of other people you have indicated you want to share some data with (by "friending" them or some other mechanism).

The Buzz was something else indeed. It was taking some people you had had contact with for random reasons, i.e. you had had email conversations with them and suddenly giving them access to a bunch of data that, where you had no intention to let them have any data.

And worse than that, withdrawing from Buzz did not deny them access to that data.