Privacy Alerts

[piccolomondo]

Congressman Pushes for Google Privacy Review

Congressman Rep. Barton, co-founder of the House Privacy Caucus, sent a letter [pdf] to Google raising 24 questions about the company's proposed $3.1 billion merger with Doubleclick. If the acquisition is approved, Barton wants the same questions answered for DoubleClick.

Barton asked Google to provide more information about its search practices and targeted advertising, including detailed definitions of "anonymization" of consumer data,
"how the data is removed, deleted once the retention period is elapsed",
"behavioral targeting," among other things.

He also asked Google to explain "the need to retain collected information for the length of time [Google retains consumer data]",
"who has access to the retained data"
and "how and why information is combined or shared across platforms."

[Al-khiyal]

Google change triggers uproar

December 27, 2007 -- A small change to Google Reader has caused a big stir among users of the online service, which lets people gather updates of blogs and Web sites onto a single Web page.

The new feature announced December 14 seemed innocuous enough: It took blog posts or articles that someone had marked for sharing and made them available to everyone that person had listed as a contact or "friend" on the Google Talk messaging service.

"I like friends! I like Reader! I hope you do too," product manager Chrix Finne wrote in a blog post.

The responses came fast and furious from people who said they were upset to find that every article they had ever marked for sharing was now available to anyone they had ever chatted with over Google Talk.

"This is the worst 'feature' you have ever introduced," a user called Modulo Noh wrote in a Google Group. The remark was quickly seconded.

"The people on my contact list are not necessarily my 'friends,' " wrote Banzaimonkey. "This is a major privacy problem." Forty-two people said they agreed.

Three days later a Google employee tried to calm the crowds, assuring them that the company was listening. Then, Google closed for the winter holidays.

The brouhaha continued.

Wednesday, a Google spokesman on vacation e-mailed a Mercury News reporter a statement that the update had been built with "transparency" and "user choice" in mind. Google has always told users of Google Reader that "shared" items were public, though before the service was tweaked, people generally had to take a step to view their friends' lists of shared items.
Lauren Weinstein, founder of the Privacy Forum said the new feature did not pose major privacy concerns, but that Google had clearly mishandled its rollout.

Jeff Henshaw, chief technology officer of DeepRockDrive.com, a live music site, said the problem was that many people who marked items for sharing on Google Reader still thought of their list as a personal stream of information. "They've taken what people have thought of as private and made it more public than it used to be," he said.

Robert Scoble, vice president of media development at PodTech.net, said Google should adjust the feature to give users more control over who can see items they mark for sharing. But he said users should also wise up a bit.