Google: Comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility to privacy
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 347=x-347-553961”>A Race to the Bottom – Privacy Ranking of Internet Service Companies.
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.
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Just read that news myself. Sigh. But just as you said – no big surprises here. I can’t help but wonder who has the most information on me – google, or my home government. And my gut tells me that it’s google. Although my gut also quite often tells me that it is hungry – even when its not! Uh, point being that my gut is occasionally wrong.
What about this street view thing? I don’t quite have it put into words yet, but I definitely have a negative feeling about it. Yeah, it’s pretty cool to be able to see things that way…but…just have a bad feeling about it.
And while we’re at it, I wish Skype would step it up a bit. They are quite vague about their security measures.. They are my main source of communication with the states from here in China, but I’ve been told by various friends that they are quite buddy-buddy with the government here.
So what’s to be done?
Well, the only good news about the “Gov’t vs. Google” question is that (as Eric Schmidt would say) with Google, you can choose not to use them. And honestly, when the company’s being run by a guy that thinks that “the value of more information so overwhelms its [potential for] misuse that we’ve not had material problems,” ( ahem until now ) I’m not so sure that’s not one of his best ideas.
The problem is, where do you turn? Yahoo!‘s rating in that study is only one level less bad, and Microsoft’s is only one level better than that (and historically, they haven’t even been that good).
Maybe the only thing to do is to try and spread that information around: use GMail if you like it, and Flickr if you like that, but do your searches on Ask.com or Microsoft’s Live search … or put your bookmarks on del.icio.us, but don’t also use Yahoo! for search … or search on Google (without logging in), but use Hotmail for email and then you can use Flickr or del.icio.us.
Oh, and by the way, Skype has a reasonable security page where they even post the security problems they’ve had. And they do encrypt all skype-to-skype calls (although I’m not clear on whether, unlike Gizmo they encrypt the internet portion of calls to/from “real” phones).