When Google Buzz launched its service, no one thought for a minute that it would cause them so much grief. Yesterday Google agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit for $8.5 million.

When first launched, there was talk over whether or not the service would be competition to social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. A few days after the launch of the service, we began to hear a bunch of complaints about privacy issues. Google automatically made people follow some of their contacts, without 100% of both social networking users’ accounts. Even though no extremely major personal information was made available to the public, it did allow certain people to see more information from their contacts than their contacts wanted them to see. This cause many people to begin looking into class-action lawsuits.

Yesterday, Google agreed to pay an $8.5 million settlement, including attorney fees for their lack of privacy in the Buzz service that was launched in February. The majority of the money will go to organizations advocating privacy on the internet. Google will also be simplifying it’s privacy policies effective on October 3.