Google is Hostile to Privacy
Posted: Tue 06/12/2007 by ramiroPrivacy International (PI) is a London based human rights group concerned with surveillance and privacy invasions by governments and corporations. PI investigated privacy practices of key Internet based companies for six month for their A Race to the Bottom report.
According to the Interim Results Google is the worst threat to privacy of the search, email, e-commerce and social networking sites they inspected.
Google was the only company assessed as Hostile to Privacy. The justification reads as follows:
Track history of ignoring privacy concerns. Every corporate announcement involves some new practice involving surveillance. Privacy officer tries to reach out but no indication that this has any effect on product and service design or delivery.
Company Ratings
The assessments of all companies according to the interim rankings are listed below from best to worst regarding privacy.
Privacy Friendly
No company received this rating.
Generally Privacy Aware
- BBC
- eBay
- Last.fm
- LiveJournal
- Wikipedia
Notable Lapses
- Amazon
- Bebo
- Friendster
- Myspace
- Skype
Serious Lapses
- Microsoft
- Orkut
- Xanga
- YouTube
Substantial Threat
- AOL
- Apple
- Hi5
- Reunion.com
- Windows Live Space
- Yahoo!
Hostile to Privacy
The one and only Google
My 50 Cent
I wonder for how long the website of Privacy International will still be found in Google's index. Publishing such results must definitely be more evil than selling or buying links in Google's eyes.
Matt Cutts reacted with this blog post I haven't read so far. But from the title it's clear that he does not agree with the outcome of PI's investigation. What a surprise ;-)
Recently I wrote an article on privacy concerns using MyBlogLog, which has not been investigated by PI. I guess they would have received a Hostile to Privacy rating too, at least I think they deserve it.
What's your opinion on privacy and Internet services and do you think the benefits they provide justify using them no matter whether the companies behind are concerned with the users' privacy?
I agree with the rating. Google has a massive amount of data, has a broad privacy policy for what it will collect, has a borad privacy policy for what it will do with the data, has worked with the government before, and has violated privacy in the past.
While it not necessarily means Google is willfully invading our privacy, the potential for abuse is great.
I put together a write up of all the Google privacy issues on my blog recently.
Post new comment