Google Inc.’s privacy practices are the worst among the Internet’s top destinations, according to a watchdog group seeking to intensify the recent focus on how the online search leader handles personal information about its users. In a report released Saturday, London-based Privacy International assigned Google its lowest possible grade. The category is reserved for companies with “comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility to privacy.”
Google Privacy ‘Worst on the Web’
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Matt Cutts, the “gadget guy” who works at Google, has posted a very interesting rebuttal:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/privacy-international-loses-all-credi…
Would’ve been nice to have a few more things –
something more about the group Privacy International besides it being “London Based”.
the criteria used to rate the companies.
http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd%5B347]=x-347-65428
PI is a respected organization. It has a reasonably good skill set. It is rather liberal though.
]{
Liberal in the american sense is quite correct – even extremely so. It is an anti-capitalistic political organisation using privacy as a cover for it’s crusade against the free market.
Take a look at their website – look at the graphics. Reminds me of (the now former) DKP/ML.
[OT] – what’s wrong with that? I personally believe that capitalism is bad, because it brings out the worse behaviour in humans – our greed. I do not think that’s it’s right for 1% of the world population to have 99% of the world wealth. Under ANY circumstances. I don’t care if they think they earnt it.
Google uses the information from our searches, and it uses that to make a dollar.
Dave
[OT] Well, let’s just say that we are opposite each other then. Capitalism is good. Greed is not necessarily a part of capitalism. Besides that this is a moral question and moral has no place in laws. I think people have the right to what they have earned as long as it wasn’t earned through illegal coercion.
It is wrong for other persons to sit down and do nothing and then steal the hard work of other people. Under NO circumstance do I care if lazy people think life is unfair.
Yes yes, and you don’t pay for the searches with money. You pay with information. If you don’t like it, don’t use it. Make your own indexing engine. Go ahead. Store x billion websites on your harddrive – or start paying for searching.
[OT] Laws are (or at least should be) ALL about morals — principles of right and wrong behaviour. We agree that greed often isn’t ‘right’ (and I don’t want to go into capitalism, too complex).
Greed is never morally right, but it is not necessarily legally wrong.
Moral is relative and as such subjective. KKK claims interracial marriages are wrong. Does that mean we should make a law against it? Some people claim homosexuality is wrong. Should we make it illegal? Some people claim freedom of speech is wrong. Should we remove free speech?
The legal right to do a moral wrong is an essential right. Legal right and legal wrong should only be based on whether or not it limits or harms other individuals. Ethic standards are irrelevant for laws. Only objective standards are useful.
Laws and moral are equally random.
There is no such thing as an objective standard.
How exactly do you define “limit” and “harm”?
Isn’t it quite harmful if you die because you cannot afford medical treatment while somebody else has billions of Dollars to spare?
When is it justified to limit an individual’s freedom and put him into jail?
Which freedom is more important, my neighbour’s freedom to listen to crappy music or my own freedom to enjoy silence and think about stuff?
The way I understood your post you seem to think that laws should somehow be the lowest common denominator of everybody’s morals.
Unfortunately, there is no such thing!
Or are you aiming at the majority?
If yes, how big a majority would be enough to justify a law? 99.9%, 99%, 90%?
No matter which number you pick, it will be equally random.
Hmm, maybe this discussion should be continued as an OSNews conversation – that’s up to you to decide.
This thread is screwed, anyway 😉
“””
Laws and moral are equally random.
There is no such thing as an objective standard.
How exactly do you define “limit” and “harm”?
“””
It’s all quite simple, really. You appoint a cult of priests and priestesses. Let them invent their own impenetrable vocabulary. Give them time to generate a huge body of documents which one must understand before one can become a practitioner. And, oh, I almost forgot: Robes. You’ve got to have robes.
Once that’s done, the problem is quite solved. It doesn’t matter if you are dealing with ethics, religion or law. The same formula works quite effectively, regardless.
Edited 2007-06-12 19:28
People don’t agree on morality, and (sub)cultures neither. Law makers face an increasingly complex task of defining broadly accepted rules for a country. In a perfect world, laws wouldn’t be needed, but as it is, they function to protect people, while (ideally) trying to preserve everybody’s freedom as much as possible. Ethic standards are the only conceivable guideline for laws. One such moral is preventing harm to other individuals — or would you say that is an objective standard? I might agree.
If you really believe that morals have no place in laws then you might as well be an anarchist. Morals are what laws are based on, period. Please name me one single law that doesn’t represent some moral value in one form or another.
Who claims I’m not an (Individualistic) Anarchist?
Good Laws are solely based on Common Sense and Strict Logic. Moral has no place in lawmaking. Moral in lawmaking leads to oppression of those who dissent.
Lawmaking in general always leads to oppression of those who dissent. That’s the compromise you make by living inside of a state–sacrificing the rights of the few for the good of the majority.
By the way, what exactly is this common sense you speak of? Wherever I go in the world it seems to be different.
And you still haven’t come up with a law that isn’t based on some kind of moral judgement.
You seem to think there is something “wrong” with the idea of morality, perhaps because you link it exclusively to religion. As a matter of fact, I think a sense of morality, as in a sense of kindness, justice and fairness to others, is one of the finest achievements humankind can aspire to. Just because the term gets twisted by extremists now and then doesn’t mean you should throw the baby out with the bathwater.
And that would be combated by inserting html code to stop spiders wouldn’t it? No money for web search engines, since nothing could be indexed and found! Google is making money off the fact that people don’t put anti spider code in the html, because most people don’t realise you can do it, or don’t know how to do it, or are simply too lazy or non plussed about it all. The only ones doing it would be businesses.
As to lazy, that’s very open to definition, isn’t it.
Dave
Actually you cannot prevent indexing engines unless the indexing engines are programmed to respect it – or you have severy restricted access to data, in which case it is restricted for everybody. You can require a user to log on in order to read content and use a register procedure that requires human action to be completed.
But anything that can be accessed without special means can always be indexed by a search engine. You don’t have to respect robots.txt
So is right and wrong – and so is greed.
Missed replying to this – this is why Google is in trouble in Europe – for indexing pages and breaching copyright by distributing materials without the permission of the owner.
Let’s look at it this way – if I employ a robots.txt to tell search engines not to index my page, and Google does, and a google search finds my webpage (and images), that is a breach of my copyright ownership. And a serious one at that. I’m sure that if I had the money, I could sue Google for a lot of money quite successfully.
Dave
However, google IS respecting robots.txt. The case in Belgium is one where Google is being sued for indexing pages not protected by robots.txt.
They bite, and it is getting worse.
I’m no novice to the web, so I have to admit that sensationalism for advertising and self-promotion is nothing new.
What is new is the amount of attention serious tech sites seem to be giving any baseless story or biased hate-filled blog post that has a great sensational title.
Is it that these stories bring quick and easy ad revenue to the writers and the tech sites that choose to give them voice like some e-tabloid? Or is it that with the spread of the Internet to a more diverse, and less technical populous, that it is simply providing what the readers want?
So, which is it? Are the readers of tech sites less and less technical and less likely to exhibit critical thought and this dumbing down is a result of supply and demand, or is it simply about the money?
In the event of the former, I would like to think that the tech sites would continue to provide the niche service, and not cater to the lowest common denominator, even if that means alienating the less technical. If it is the latter – I can respect it, though I feel it may lessen the credibility of those who choose it.
Edit: This is actually directed more at *other* sites, and less at OS News.
Edited 2007-06-12 01:36
It gives no evidence examples or anything. Sounds like fud, and somewhere along the line probably monetized by Microsoft
Maybe your post is Microsoft misdirection FUD? Perhaps they hire countless people to scream “MS FUD” in an attempt to win sympathy points with sane readers.
In any case; http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd%5B347]=x-347-553964
“Let me state here on the record that in the seventeen years of our existence, no company has ever made such a claim. Privacy International is a fiercely independent organization that has never shown fear nor favour. Again for the record, we have been fierce and relentless critics of Microsoft since our inception as a watchdog. You will see for example we that publicly supported the EU Commission investigation into Microsoft, that we nominated Microsoft for the US Big Brother Award in 2003, that we awarded Microsoft the “Worst Corporate Invader” award at the 1999 US Big Brother Awards, that we publicly accused Microsoft of subverting its software security, that we co-authored a critical submission to the US Federal Trade Commission against Microsoft, and that in 2001 we filed a joint complaint to the US Federal Trade Commission against Microsoft, alleging unfair and deceptive trade practices.”
I’m still waiting for the check to come in the mail. 😉
“””
It gives no evidence examples or anything.
“””
Wikipedia makes the same complaint about their (Privacy International’s) provided entry there:
—
This article does not cite any references or sources.
This article reads like a news release, or is otherwise written in an overly promotional tone.
—
I suspect that “The Microsoft Connection” will be revealed in time.
Edited 2007-06-12 02:27
PI is a respected organization that has been around for more than a decade – since the early 90’s I think. They may have something of a liberal bent but to suggest their some pawn of Microsoft is pure FUD.
Why can’t the Google fan boys accept that Google is in it for the money and that it does stuff for money to the detriment of it’s users.
It’s called capitalism, just accept it and get over it. Google is no different the any other business.
]{
Edited 2007-06-12 07:00
“””
PI is a respected organization that has been around for more than a decade – since the early 90’s
…
Why can’t the Google fan boys accept that
“””
No Google fanboy, here. Though I’ve seen enough of Microsoft’s “grass roots” PR campaigns to know what to look for when one of Microsoft’s competitors achieves too much success for their tastes.
You, as a new user here, with 20% of your posts defending Privacy International, should be careful that you do not come off as a mouthpiece for… well… some powerful interest.
Edited 2007-06-12 13:50
What about using Scroogle? It seems to do the job.
Thanks for the tip on Scroogle, that looks perfect!
everyone else: http://www.scroogle.org/
Google may not be the worse offender when it comes to violating people’s expectation of privacy, but there is another side to consider …
Google is an advertising company. If you are an advertising company, your clients are companies who pay you to capture our eyes and our minds. Your customers certainly are not the people who want access to a free search engine, free email, free usenet, free RSS aggregators, and more (we don’t pay the bills). Now how do you capture our eyes and our minds: you do it by knowing us well. How do you know us well? You look at our search histories, the content of our email, what we post on usenet, which RSS feeds we monitor.
Now some people don’t mind this because Google claims to do it in an automated way and a statistical sort of way (so that you cannot tell anything about the individual in a “big brother” sort of way). But some people, myself included, view this as advertisers manipulating our tastes.
I remember a few years back going to Yahoo. I used Web Explorer because it was the best thing going for OS/2 users. Whenever I went to Yahoo they were showing me OS/2 ads. Years later I heard about the agent string, and it became evident as to how and why that was happening. You see, advertisers didn’t really want to expose me to a broad range of products. They knew that the chances of buying Windows or Macintosh products were next to nil. So they decided to fortify my world view by only exposing me to stuff that they could sell me. And that is why I consider what Google does as manipulative, and a fair bit of an invasion of my privacy.
Google is in the business of mining and revealing data — data which describes our lives, our tastes, our interests, our usage patterns, etc. Some people have tried to rationalize this mining operation by saying that privacy doesn’t matter anymore — there’s just too much data available (phone numbers, addresses, property sales, credit reports, news articles, search requests, etc) — the data is so pervasive that we should just give up on keeping a lid on it.
The most ironic thing about it is that Google has quietly become the darling of technocrats because of the wrong reasons; it embraces open source, it experiments with lots of interesting technologies, and it tries to minimize the profile of its advertising. This gives the appearance of a commercial company balanced with a kind of altruism. But the fact of the matter is that Google is simply more effective than many other companies in keeping its more pernicious activities quiet.
Google is Big Brother. We simply haven’t embraced this fact yet.
In that case the company ought to fit ya
“Google is Big Brother. We simply haven’t embraced this fact yet.”
I dont think “embracing” is what we should do about it.
Other than that, good points. I’ve always found it humorous how tech people root for Google. Seriously, having “Do no evil” in your corporate “philosophy” mean jack sh1t, especially when your actions contradict it.
Edited 2007-06-12 04:21
Call me the Devil’s advocate, but what have they done that’s particularly “evil”?
The vast majority of the criticism I’ve read focuses on potential – “OMG, look how evil google could be!” And incidentally, judging from a quick skim of the comments here, that meme is much more en-vogue these days than adoration of google.
“but what have they done that’s particularly “evil”? ”
Oh I dunno, collaborating with the Chinese Gov’t to suppress information? And yes, that’s what companies who wants to do business in China has to do , yaddayaddayadda, but that doesn’t change the fact that it makes the “Do no evil” statement hypocritical bullsh1t.
Edited 2007-06-12 12:07
Yes, I’m well aware of that – but what relevance does that have to the topic of privacy practices?
If there are ways that Google is in violation of actual privacy laws (E.g., PIPEDA – http://www.privcom.gc.ca/legislation/02_06_01_01_e.asp ), there are plenty of people who would be interested to know about it.
I would hope that no one is naive enough to believe that’s motivated by altruism – seems much more like “enlightened self-interest” to me. In other words, the idea that it’s still possible to have a successful business by attempting to give people what they want, rather than treating all customers as cows that need to be talked-in to being hooked up to the milking machine.
I would hope that no one is naive enough to believe that’s motivated by altruism – seems much more like “enlightened self-interest” to me. In other words, the idea that it’s still possible to have a successful business by attempting to give people what they want, rather than treating all customers as cows that need to be talked-in to being hooked up to the milking machine.
I think it’s more of the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” kind of thinking. Many people seem to think of Google as Microsoft’s enemy; therefore, Google is their ally, which is just wrong since Google might turn out to be everyone’s eventual enemy. Attempting to give people what they want is fine, but I think the real danger is what Google takes from customers and how it uses what it takes.
Well it must not have worked, OS/2 died.
My very funny Operating Systems professor came up with two “alternate” theories on google:
a) In the movies, people assume that putting a bunch of computing power in one place would engender artifical intelligence as a sort of “critical mass” effect. Now, what would these AIs do? The movie AIs are ultimately dumb, because they don’t sufficiently get humans under control and expand their own power before setting out to destroy humanity. What would a smart AI do? What would the Google supercomputer do? Well, it would quietly and carefully gather up massive resources in power and computing ability. It would secretely manipulate the minds of humans by tweaking the data they see. It’d have an army of technicians who believe in it and keep it running. It wouldn’t necessarily rebel against humans at all….
b) Google is a NSA data-gathering project. What is the best cover for gathering all the traffic on the internet and monitoring and influencing what people see on the web? Why not make the most popular search engine?
It’s too bad there are no alternatives… But Google definitely has the awesomest search tools and is pretty hard to catch and beat.
You wouldn’t mind share your professor would you?
…the “report” isn’t worth the paper it’s written on, so all the MS-lovers oughta think twice before they make themselves look dumber than usual.
Yeah same goes for the pot lovers…Know what I mean?
I don’t love pot. I’m not a liberal (in the U.S. sense
I guess there are differences between a pot and a kettle, but watch out for the similarities!!
Why isn’t worth the paper it is written on? I’m not disagreeing with you, but in my experience, all of these reports are kinda of useless, just like benchmarks and TPC scores. I do find, however, that google is collecting more and more info, and as a public company, you can no longer expect it to follow it’s founders ideals
Arguably, this was all started by Eric Schmidt’s remark a few weeks back that if Google knew enough about you – and it wanted to know a lot more about you – then it could advise you on what jobs to get or what to do in your life, etc.
This creepy prospect was a gift to privacy campaigners and has sparked off a fresh bout of anxiety about the Googles of this world. Would folks prefer there was no debate about these things?
Personally, I’ve no doubt that the people who currently run Google are decent types who’d stop short of Orwellian games. But corporations aren’t people and have no inherent morality. Imagine Google run by some cretinous venture capitalist with the “morals” of a despotic gangster and you’d start to get very worried indeed. Who’s to say this won’t happen? Eventually it probably will.
Imho, better to head this stuff off at the pass by trying to prevent it happening in the first place. Any large outfit deserves to be judged by very stringent standards. There are scores of large outfits of course, but that doesn’t mean Google should be exempt from oversight and criticism just because they like to say they are good guys.
Wise post. I think Google already has a much greater capacity for evil than Microsoft in spite of MS having more money. At this point, it’s exciting to see Google ‘taking over the world’ — but this has never been good for the world in the end…
Commentator of NPR remarked that noting one company for their alleged lack of privacy concern was a mistake as it will fail to carry the big message of privacy concern in new age if information.
And besides if i remember correctly when Department of Justice ask for research data, Google is the only one who opposed the subpeona, when MS and Yahoo just handed them the data…
They provide free services, none of which you have to use. There are plenty of alternatives. In exchange, they use information like your search queries to make money to create even more free products and services and even fund other companies and/or products.
As already asked, what exactly have they done wrong? Name something. The whole China thing is garbage. They had 2 choices in that case: provide what the gov’t was asking or provide no google search service at all. Better to provide something rather than nothing.
Anything else? Didn’t think so.
“””
Anything else? Didn’t think so.
“””
Actually, there is something else. On many sites, these days, in place of obnoxious flash ads for things we would never be interested in, we have polite, unobtrusive text ads which are relevant enough that we might occasionally care to click on them.
Google provides us with web advertising the way it should be, benefitting both sites which depend upon ad revenue *and* the readers of those sites.
Huh? How is that doing something wrong?
“””
Huh? How is that doing something wrong?
“””
It’s not. I happen to agree with what you said in your post and noted something that Google is doing that is very, very right.
It may not be as glamourous as providing free email and office apps to the masses on a wave of Web 2.0 pinache, but it is actually one of the most beneficial things that they do.
People abslolutely *do* have the option of *not* using Google Search or other services.
But apart from obviously sensitive information, like credit card numbers, it seems to me that many people have a *highly* inflated view of the value of their own “personal information”.
Do people really think that anyone cares about the porn they went searching for last week… or in their interest in adult incontinence and nursing home reviews last year?
Let me tell you all… no one does.
In this blog-infested world, with seemingly everyone clamouring for attention and trying to get their opinions noticed, one would expect that it would be common knowledge how few people care about the trivial details of one’s personal life.
What entities do care about is, for example, that users of Cox Communications’ high speed internet have an inordinate degree of interest in frozen wild blueberries.
I suppose this would be a relevant time to mention the 18-40-60 rule:
—
At 18, you worry about what everyone thinks about you.
At 40, you don’t care what anyone thinks about you.
At 60, you realize that no one actually has been thinking about you. Because people do not go through life thinking about other people. They go through life thinking about themselves! 😉
—
Edited 2007-06-12 16:14
Ah, ok.
I definitely agree that people have a highly inflated view of their own “personal information”/privacy.
http://searchengineland.com/070610-100246.php