Misplaced Pages

Google and privacy issues: Difference between revisions

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.
Browse history interactivelyNext edit →Content deleted Content addedVisualWikitext
Revision as of 20:31, 28 December 2004 editJ heisenberg (talk | contribs)Extended confirmed users3,837 edits Started. If not NPOV, bias could be adjusted  Revision as of 21:03, 28 December 2004 edit undoBrokenSegue (talk | contribs)Administrators13,401 editsm →See Also: one lineNext edit →
Line 43: Line 43:
====See Also==== ====See Also====
* *
*, a site critical of *, a site critical of Google's privacy policies]
Google's privacy policies]
*, blog about Google's information collection *, blog about Google's information collection


Revision as of 21:03, 28 December 2004

As the world's biggest search and ad-broker company, Google has drawn its share of criticism and concern about the privacy of its user.

Information collected by Google

Google uses a unique cookie for each individual user. This is submitted every time a user does a Google search, visits a site using AdSense 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 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

Other information is submitted by Google's utilities, s.a. Google Bar and Desktop Search.

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. 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 refering to indiual user statistics.

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 the mentioning of the ubiquity of Googles search engine, AdSense/AdWords technology and other services giving it a unique wealth of information.

See Also

Category: