NEW YORK (Bloomberg) — Google Inc.'s Buzz social-networking service might violate federal privacy laws a watchdog group said in a complaint to the US Federal Trade Commission yesterday.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center, based in Washington, asked the FTC to investigate whether consumers were harmed and to require that Google give e-mail users the choice of receiving Buzz instead of enrolling them automatically. Canada's privacy watchdog said yesterday she will review the service to verify that it complies with the nation's laws.

Google, owner of the world's most-popular search engine, added Buzz this month to its Gmail e-mail service. Some users complained that they were placed in a network of people based on contacts they'd made. On February 13, Google said it would no longer automatically assign the most frequently used contacts to a user's social network and wouldn't link Buzz to customer albums on the Picasa photo-sharing site.

"We've already made a few changes based on user feedback and we have more improvements in the works," Victoria Katsarou, a spokeswoman for Google, said.