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| As the world's biggest search and ad-broker company, ] has drawn its share of criticism and concern about the privacy of its user. | |||
| ===Information collected by Google=== | |||
| Google uses a unique ] for each individual user. This is submitted every time a user does a Google ], visits a site using ] etc. Specifically, | |||
| *Everything you search for using Google | |||
| *Every web page you visit that has Google Adsense ads on it | |||
| *Which country you're in | |||
| *Every Blogger page you visit, and the referring page | |||
| If you have an Adsense account | |||
| *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 ] 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 ] | |||
| *Posts through ] | |||
| *Photos stored in ] | |||
| *Which news groups you read through ] | |||
| Other information is submitted by Google's utilities, s.a. ] and ]. | |||
| ===Google's stated policies=== | |||
| Google explicitly states it does not share individual users' information with third parties. The whole privacy statement can be read are available online . | |||
| ===US privacy laws concerning Google=== | |||
| ''to be completed'' | |||
| ===Criticism and Discussion=== | |||
| The main criticisms concerning privacy are: | |||
| * A cookie without expiration date - effectively enabeling Google to connect all traffic to specific users | |||
| * No way a user can access or delete her/his user information kept by Google | |||
| * No expiration/deletion policy for user information | |||
| * No disclosure what the information is used for, e.g. ], targeted offers in affiliated ]s or targeted ] 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. | |||
| The collection of information of users is not unique to Google. Other search providers like ] and ], as well as large shopping and auction sites (], ]) apply similar policies. Many argue, that access technologies as ], 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 the mentioning of the ubiquity of Googles search engine, AdSense/AdWords technology and other services giving it a unique wealth of information. | |||
| ====See Also==== | |||
| * | |||
| *, a site critical of Google's privacy policies | |||
| *, blog about Google's information collection | |||
| ] | |||
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