Insider Chatter by Donna Bogatin

Privacy International, a UK based “world organization for the protection of privacy,” has declared Google engages in “comprehensive consumer surveillance” and asserts the leading worldwide Internet company has an “entrenched hostility to privacy.”

How does the “watchdog” backup its assertion that Google is “hostile to privacy”? By reading Google’s public facing privacy policies.

I also have been a privacy “watchdog” over Google for the past year by dissecting Google’s privacy policies, and have come to the same conclusions as Privacy International. Who else agrees? The New York State Consumer Protection Board (CPB).   

People may not realize it, but Google already collects and retains an enormous amount of personal data about the specific websites and advertisements that are visited by millions of people, said Mindy Bockstein Chairperson and Executive Director of the CPB.

The CPB is urging the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to require Google to commit to:

a plan to protect Google’s database from cyberthieves;

consumer access to the personally-identifiable information in Google’s database and the ability to delete or edit inaccurate information;

an opt-out mechanism that would allow an Internet user to prevent Google from tracking and storing information about the websites visited by an individual computer user; and,

remedies in the event of a data breach or failure to comply with a consumer’s opt-out request.

In light of Google’s planned purchase of DoubleClick, the CPN has also issued a consumer alert, urging New Yorkers to “take action to protect your privacy”:

Goggle, Inc. plans to buy DoubleClick Inc. This merger presents significant privacy implications. The combination of DoubleClick’s Internet surfing history generated through consumers’ pattern of clicking on specific advertisements, coupled with Google’s database of consumers’ past Internet searches, will result in the creation of “super-profiles,” which will make up the world’s single largest electronic repository of personally and non-personally identifiable information. Without appropriate safeguards, this database could, for example, be made available without consumers’ knowledge or consent to secondary users, including vendors of personal data, as well as made public as evidence in litigation or through data breaches.

New York is asking consumers to write to the Federal Trade Commission to:

Voice concern regarding the privacy implications of the DoubleClick and Google merger (and) to require Google to protecty the security and integrity of our private data, including by allowing consumers the ability to access, edit and delete personal information contained within the database, and to opt-out from being listed in the database.

The lack of user access to and ability to opt-out from Google’s data repositories is the most hostile of Google’s privacy “policies.”

As use of the Google platform grows, along with Google’s ambitions, so do the data and privacy risks inherent to reliance on the Google cloud. 

Google’s Privacy Policy pages reinforce that while Google may tout data “portability,” the Google user data Cloud remains, for all practical purposes, impenetrable for users. Google may allow users to manipulate their data offline, but it does not put forth any absolute guarantee that users are able to modify, correct and/or permanently delete their personal and private data from the Google systems.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt publicly declares that his company does “not trap user data,” but he is disingenuous.

Google continues to buy up land through out the world in a multi-billion dollar server farm manifest destiny aimed at ensuring the $160 billion market cap corporation has the infrastructure necessary to house in perpetuity every piece of information in the world, owned by every individual, business and organization in the world, in Google’s massively encroaching Cloud for use to Google’s corporate advantage.

What is the ultimate Google end-game? To grow its market cap even more, the world’s privacy be damned.

UPDATE:  Google 18 month Consumer Data Trap and Google is WRONG On Consumer Privacy 

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN