More Google Privacy Fears

By Greg Beck

Google won at least partial praise from privacy advocates last month with its announcement that it plans to purge identifying information from its database of web searches after 18 to 24 months.  But recent news again raises concerns about Google's privacy policies.

First, Google announced that it plans to acquire DoubleClick, Inc., which distributes Internet-based ads and tracks which ads web browsers click.  The merger raises fears that Google could combine its existing massive databases of its users' search habits with Doubleclick's equally massive database on users' behavior to create a combined database of Web users and their browsing habits. 

Google and DoubleClick claim that they will not merge the data in this way, but critics are not mollified.  The merger prompted three consumer groups, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, PIRG, and the Center for Digital Democracy, to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission raising privacy and antitrust concerns.  Although Google's privacy policy discloses that it saves personally identifying information, the objecting consumer groups argue that Google's practices are nevertheless deceptive because the disclosure is difficult to find and because survey data shows that most Google users don't know that Google stores personally identifiable data along with a user's search history.

Second, Google has announced a new service to track every website that web browsers click on from its search results.  The service includes one critical feature that is worthy of praise:  it is completely voluntary.  Google's privacy policy, however, doesn't rule out saving this data even without a user's consent, and, in fact, specifically provides that "Google may present links in a format that enables us to keep track of whether these links have been followed."  Google does store information about which websites users visit in at least some circumstances.  Moreover, when a user clicks on a link from Google's search results, the user's browser is sent to Google's own server before being sent to the requested web page, in a way that would allow Google to track which sites users click.  Google's policy raises concerns that it can link data on which websites its users visit with personally identifying information and that, once again, consumers might not realize the amount of privacy they are sacrificing whenever they search the web.

Comments

[Anil Pathak]

Hi,
I work on restaurant where every month or two an old man comes, Food Inspector, to check the hygine and condition of resturant. For customers they can rely on food inspector to believe on food we serve. But no one knows what we do :-).

Google has his system private their codes never seen by anybody else. (Not even Information inspector :-) ) how can we trust them that they wont be collecting marketing and other valuable information from our emails and their toolbar installed in our firefox and ie.

Further more i see future of google going downward as the results they publish are completely driven by advertishment. They are now a ad-big-fish instead of search engine emperor. Further i suspect there are other ad agencies excluding doubleclick who are tied with google, Google leads every user either to Wikipedia or site with hell lots of nonsence ads and nothing else.