Google and Privacy Issues
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia, by MultiMedia
As the world's biggest search and
ad-broker company, Google has drawn its share of criticism and concern
about the privacy of its users. Its privacy policy was revised on
October 14, 2005. Additionally, privacy info about various Google
services
was made also available.
Information collected by Google
Google uses a unique cookie for each browser used by an individual user
on a computer. This cookie contains information which allows Google to
identify records about that user on its database. This cookie is submitted
every time a user does a Google search,
visits a site using AdSense etc. The information
stored in Google's database, which is identified by the cookie, includes
- Everything you search for using
Google
- Every web page you visit that has Google
Adsense ads on it
- Every Blogger page you visit
If you have an Adsense account, the following
will also be stored
- Your full name, address and bank account details
- The IP address of everyone who visits your pages with
Adsense ads on them
- The number of visitors to each of your pages with
Adsense ads on them
If you use a Gmail account
- Content and addresses of emails and Usenet posts you send or receive
in an Gmail account
If you're a member of Orkut
- Your online social network, interests and groups
As well as
- Purchases in Froogle
- Posts through Blogger
- Which news groups you read through Google Groups
Other information is submitted by Google's utilities, such as Google Bar.
Google's stated policies
Some say that Google explicitly states it does not share individual
users' information with third parties. The whole privacy statement can be
read online .
Google's Information Rights clause (see paragraph #6 at
http://www.google.com/analytics/tos_en-US.html ) says Google may retain and
use, and with good faith belief, access, preserve, or disclose any
information deemed reasonably necessary to protect the "safety of Google".
Criticism and discussion
The main criticisms concerning privacy are:
- The cookie's expiration date is set in the far future (as long as
the standard allows), and this expiration date is updated every time the
cookie is accessed.
- There is no way a user can access or delete her/his user information
kept by Google
- There is no expiration/deletion policy for user information
- There is no disclosure what the information is used for, e.g. target
ads, targeted offers in affiliated shopping sites or targeted
search results.
Google maintains that
We use cookies to improve the quality of our service and to better
understand how people interact with us. Google does this by storing user
preferences in cookies and by tracking user trends and patterns of how
people search.
Critics, however, argue that user preferences can be stored in non-unique
cookies, and that user statistics can be retrieved without referring to
individual user statistics.
It is possible to delete the Google cookie at any time; however a new cookie
and new records will be created the next time you visit Google or use a
Google affiliated service. For each web-browser, on each computer you use, a
different copy of the cookie will be stored, possibly referring to different
records in the Google database.
The collection of information of users is not unique to Google. Other search
providers like Yahoo! and MSN, as well as large shopping and auction sites
(Amazon, Ebay) apply similar policies. Many argue, that access technologies
as Microsoft Passport, suggestion
services like
the ones employed in ... are far more invasive to users' privacy than those
employed by Google. This in turn is countered by mentioning of the ubiquity
of Google's search engine,
AdSense/AdWords
technology and other
services
giving it a unique wealth of information.
External links
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