How's Google's privacy record?

by Brad Linder Jun 11th 2007

Here's the formula for getting a lot of publicity for pretty much any report you want to produce: Target Google. So it should be no surprise that Privacy International is getting a lot of press for a report released over the weekend.

The privacy advocacy group conducted a 6 month study of 23 of internet companies including Google, Microsoft, MySpace and eBay. And they determined that Google doesn't care very much about your privacy.

That conclusion is based partly on the fact that Google collects so much personal data as part of its many services from GMail to Google Reader to your personal search history. While that data may help Google provide you with a better user experience, it also means you're forfeiting some control over your personal information. Google plans to begin anonymizing user search data, but the company was still ranked last in Privacy International's study.

Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has a breakdown of the claims in the study, and he concludes that it's the result of pretty shoddy research. And Google's Matt Cutts blogs about some of the rather dubious claims in the report, such as the assertion that "Every [Google] corporate announcement involves some new practice involving surveillance." Sure, Cutts works for Google, so you know where his loyalties lie. But "every corporate announcement" Seriously?

There's no doubt that Google and other companies that collect your personal data as a matter of course could probably do a better job of protecting that data or responding to requests to eliminate if from there servers. But while it'd be nice to see a detailed comparison of how companies deal with private data, it's not clear if that's what this study provides. At the very least, it's hard to compare companies like eBay and Google's privacy records when the data they collect is very different.

Tags: personal data, PersonalData, privacy, privacy international, PrivacyInternational, private data, PrivateData

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