Quote:

"On Saturday, a London-based privacy advocacy group, Privacy
International, released the preliminary results of a six-month survey
of Internet privacy practices. The organization evaluated 23 Internet
companies on several criteria, and assigned each company a color-coded
privacy assessment, ranging from green ("privacy-friendly and privacy
enhancing") to black ("comprehensive consumer surveillance &
entrenched hostility to privacy"). "

Google was the only company to receive the "black" rating. Nobody
received the "green" rating, however. Google disagrees with the
rating. Here is the article:

http://www.newsfactor.com/news/Google-Gets-Failing-Grade-for-Privacy/...

Thoughts?

Matt Cutts has posted a dispute of the claims on his blog:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/

If "Yeah but he hit me first, waahhhaaaaa" is a valid argument.
What's next the, "Dad, he's touching me" defense?

On Jun 11, 1:00 pm, dotnetninja wrote:

"Privacy" is defined how?

Corporate administrative details?  Who cares?
Corporate leadership? Another, who cares?
Data collection and processing? Maybe of concern to the paranoid.
Data retention? More paranoid fodder.
Openness and Transparency? Definitely a paranoid parameter.
Responsiveness?  Gotta respond to the paranoid or you lose.
Ethical compass? Where do they get this shit?
Customer and User control? Always remember your tin-foil hat.
Fair gateways and authentication? That translates to "surveillance"?
Privacy enhancing innovations and Privacy invasive innovations?  A
memory of a gnat is good, a memory of an elephant is bad, shoot all
elephants.

Privacy?  You want to talk about privacy?  How about the number of
times various banks have had hundreds of thousands of customer
accounts compromised?

How about people who are more than willing to have almost all aspects
of their lives outside the home recorded by numerous security cameras
that are all over the place.  Pick almost any point in a reasonable
size city and it is probably covered by one or more security cameras.
All that yet their Internet privacy, which a nebulous thing to begin
with, is more important?

I suppose if someone has to justify their job, they eventually have to
feed the hype and paranoia in order to stay alive.

I'm not pissed because Google ended up on the list where it did, I'm
pissed because people who have given up just about every form of
privacy they can, without thinking about it, latch on to one thing
that is the least likely to ever cause a true breach in their privacy
and elevate that to the level of a holy grail.

They should hand out tinfoil hats with their results.

I think the issue is more than just black and white (or green :-)) --
there are some great things set in motion and Google is doing an
amazing amount of groundbreaking work. A lot of that requires that you
give Google information about yourself, the easiest way is through
letting them watch you.

Think about the future of search: assuming there won't be a magical
innovation in user-interface, the only way to go forward is through
"AI". AI works best by watching the users behaviour and learning from
it. Since every user is different, it won't help to watch all users in
general (from an anonymous data collection) - it will only be able to
work by watching you in particular and by tying your behaviour in to
your account. How could they work on creating a search engine that
learns and brings you the results that *you* want to see for your
query of "kittens" without collecting your data? And in order to learn
which data is really relevant for tuning the search engine, they will
have to collect as much data as possible. Those pesky engineers -
always wanting more data to test algorithims on...

Add the other two classical elements that come into play with all
security based problems: "ease of use" vs "security". Getting a system
that is both easy to use and secure in all senses is just plain
impossible. Try to get a user to choose an 8-character password with
mixed-case, alpha and numerical characters, and get him to change it
every few months. They want auto-login. We're all lazy :-).

I'm naive and likely to believe a lot of things :-) - but from what
I've seen from Google (even from the few internal details that you can
make out from the outside) I am likely to believe that they do treat
the data with respect and that they will only hand it out in a very
special situation (and not just sell it to the highest bidder). Of
course things like that can change, but I believe Google has a high
internal standard when it comes to data security and they won't just
exchange details between account types. You can see this in action
when it comes to Made-For-Adsense sites: it would be so easy to just
block the account if the "search quality" group were to work hand-in-
hand with the "Adsense" group -- that they don't do that is a loss for
search quality but it also shows how highly they respect the data.
Simple things like that make me assume that the rest of the data is
fairly secure as well. Again, things can always change...

Just my 2 cents :-)

John

Dealing with Google for many years I'm somewhat confident that my data
are safe. That's not a question of trusting a company by naively
buying a "Don't be evil" motto, that's a matter of personal
relationships. Each and every Googler I've met (online) was/is a
honest and straightforward person. Always, without exception, when a
Googler asked for personal data, a fax or phone#, a shipping address,
URLs or whatever, s/he told me exactly how the data would be used, how
long and where they get stored (if  at all) and so on. This consistent
behavior goes back to 2000 or so when I had the first contacts with
Google, and the carefulness on privacy issues practiced by each and
every Googler I know created trust in the company. Google has all my
personal data, knows all my sites (a lot of them are really spammy,
heavily penalized or even banned), and never ever any piece of
information leaked out (to other teams or the public), and never ever
Google penalized my clean stuff because they know that I'm (was) not
an angel. Nowadays I do questionable stuff just for testing purposes,
believe it or not - I don't care much, but even in the good old days
when I had quite the opposite of a white hat reputation Google treated
me very fair. For example Googlers helped me to get porn sites back on
the SERPs which were violating each and every quality guideline (back
then Google didn't provide webmaster guidelines, respectively from
2001/2002 on they just said "make users happy, don't spam and don't
cloak" on one tiny "Dos & Don'ts" page). Since we know (or assume)
that Google stores everything she gets a hand on from the stone age up
to the next century, why does it obviously not harm, at least in my
case?  I do pretty much research -with personalized search active and
toolbar all attributes=on- on banned stuff, hacking and spamming, porn
- even child porn and bestiality, for various reasons. Not to speak of
all the search queries I submit while doing SEO work for clients or
questioners here. How come that on my personal home page Google
recommends only geek stuff, how comes they don't ban me or turn me in
for the research I do for a child care organization? My Google account
data enables Google to link it to my address they have on file at
several departments. Again, nothing leaks out. I'm not sure whether I
weren't that confident if I'd do really nasty things online, but I
still feel good using Google services.

So if you wear a tinfoil hat:
- deinstall the toolbar
- delete your Google account
- disable cookies and JS
- search at Ask, MSN or Yahoo or don't search at all.

However, I think it would be nice when Google could communicate
privacy issues more clearly. Just knowing they don't do evil w/o
communicating that stance does not produce trust.

Sebastian

On Jun 11, 10:47 pm, JohnMu wrote:

Trust by whoom?  Sheeple lead to the slaughter in more ways than they
can count while they worry about little things like someone knowing
what they searched for at some point in time?  Although I suppose that
since there are so many people out there like that, some concessions
have to be made.

But, were I Google, I'd be laughing at the idiocy people are showing.
What is Google's greatest asset?  How likely are they to share that
asset with anyone?

Privacy issues, which again are nebulous at best, are nothing compared
to the value of Google's greatest asset, its data.  All I have to be
concerned about is Google being prudent with their assets and I know
that whatever "privacy" issues one could imagine to exist are moot.

Maybe it is a Western concept, this "privacy" thing and maybe people
in the West think that people in the East have less of it but I think
it is more likely that the people in the East are just more realistic.

If people want to worry about Internet "privacy", worry about your
ISPs.  Google may know what you searched for but your ISPs know what
you downloaded!  :-()

I agree, the ISPs are probably the most underrated privacy issue out
there - they can keep track of all the URLs that you visit, they could
even keep track of what you send to forms on pages (messages sent
through your webmail, through your normal mail, etc). I know that many
of them do keep track of the URLs and will sell that information to
anyone who's interested (and willing to pay). How much private
information are you giving away that way? It has all your searches in
there, no matter if on Google, Yahoo or MSN/Live -- no matter if
you're logged in to an account or not.

Like Craig said, Google will fight for it's right to have and use the
data exclusively - your ISP isn't interested in that, your data is
just additional income for them.

John

Sorry if this winds up as a duplicate, I'm not sure what happened
there.
When I clicked submit on my previous reply, it told me everything was
fine and then the whole thing fell over.

Anyway... just in case the post's been lost in here, I've also stuck
it on my occasional ranty blog.

http://icegiant.wordpress.com

Also, with regards to tinfoil hats; I find that the only way to be
truly safe is to sleep with my head in the microwave ;-)

On Jun 11, 8:57 pm, dotnetninja wrote:

What infuriates me about privacy international is that legally UK
businesses/organizations are required to register under the data
protection Act in order to e.g. run a CCTV system/store customer
details electronically etc. We have to keep accurate recordings for up
to 6 months and we have to make available to the public all that data
and more as required by the data protection act. We also have to
annually pay a fee to the data protection registrar. We do not object
to having to do all this because the purpose of this Act was to
maintain the privacy of the public i.e. under the Act you must
disclose all info/data you hold to any customer that requests to see
it including any data mined from cookies.
So with this in mind does Privacy International respect the data
protection act ------ NO!!!!!!!!
Extract from their privacy policy 'In accordance with the Data
Protection Act 1998 and the Office of the Information Commissioner we
are not registered on the public register of data controllers as we
are a not for profit organization.'
Yep they get round the data protection act by masquerading as a
charity. That way they can legally collect all and any data from any
individual without being forced to disclose it.
Other examples of their practices that can be found on their privacy
policy include...
  'We run a limited number of mailing lists, and the membership of the
mailing lists are kept confidential'  - so access their site and yep
you are now on a mailing list.
You could always phone them and complain but ..'Telephone calls
received on our number are serviced by Skype and are beyond our
control. As a result, the traffic data for these calls may be
retained' so chances are your conversation will be recorded without
the requirement to disclose the recording imposed on all other
organisations.

What a bunch of hypocrites.

I must say I do love the 'not for profit' tag, which is often confused
with 'non profit'.

Times used to be when 'not for profit' was just applied to
organisations which were normally grant funded and run to provide a
service in the community.
Although they were technically allowed to make a profit, very few of
them actually ever did, since money was not the driving force behind
the endeavor.

Nowadays though, it seems that more and more companies are taking
advantage of the 'not for profit' tag, since it conjures up visions of
a charitable organisation with most people when the organisation in
question is in fact just another business out to make a buck.

As I said last night, before things got lost; the whole thing stinks
of linkbait, especially since the Privacy International site tags the
report as 'Interim Rankings'
The final version is not due out until September, so there's plenty of
time to revise stuff and apologise after you've milked it for all the
publicity it's worth.

I should have really thought to check out their privacy policy ;-)

Cheeky B*stards

On Jun 13, 2:18 pm, silverstall wrote:

Privacy is privacy.  Either you comply with THEIR standards of privacy
or you do NOT.  My website complies with a lot of different
standards.  And, sometimes you have to change your way of doing
business before you can become certified.

All software systems seem to have those nasty little loops holes, here
and there. :)

On Jun 11, 1:57 pm, dotnetninja wrote: