So, Privacy International has made official and extremely public what I’ve been muttering about for years: Google doesn’t care about your privacy. A recent study they published rated Google as the worst internet service. In fact, in light of the results, they actually called the study A Race to the Bottom – Privacy Ranking of Internet Service Companies=x-347-553961

We are aware that the decision to place Google at the bottom of the ranking is likely to be controversial, but throughout our research we have found numerous deficiencies and hostilities in Google’s approach to privacy that go well beyond those of other organizations. While a number of companies share some of these negative elements, none comes close to achieving status as an endemic threat to privacy. This is in part due to the diversity and specificity of Google’s product range and the ability of the company to share extracted data between these tools, and in part it is due to Google’s market dominance and the sheer size of its user base. Google’s status in the ranking is also due to its aggressive use of invasive or potentially invasive technologies and techniques.

I can’t really add much information that the news and reviewing
magazines, radio, and blogs have written … The bottom line is that Google’s gathering unbelievable amounts of data, and not providing users with any way to have most of that data deleted. According to Privacy International this is because_they don’t believe_ that they are collecting sensitive information ... even though they track your use of blogs, email, maps, and searches, as well as what links you click on, et. On top of that, their corporate culture leads them to mix together the login, cookie, and tracking data from all their different services without explicitly telling you they will do so, and they retain the data for years. Ultimately they have a “track history of ignoring privacy concerns” and their response to this report doesn’t make one think they’re taking it seriously.

Oh, and just as a postscript, this reaction from Kevin Bankston (an attorney at EFF) to Google’s new street view photos (streams of 360° photos taken from vans driving through dozens of major cities across the US):

There are a lot of people on the Web who are, I think, freaked out by this they find it kind of icky and uncomfortable, I don’t think Google has done anything illegal here, but I do think they’ve done something that’s exceptionally rude.