This is the summary of the article by Chris Jay Hoofnagle, which discusses about Google’s policies and privacy methods with regard to the information being shared around the world and how they respond to the information privacy concerns about their product. This essay also criticizes one of the company’s mottos “you can make money without doing evil”. You can get the pdf of the behavioral targeting article here: Beyond Google and Evil
Google’s privacy issues not yet resolved
These discussions are based on the hundreds of news articles taken from many sources, including Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. According to their sources, Google says to the public that their privacy issues have been resolved even though this isn’t true. Every time the company is asked about privacy, they always respond with “privacy is important” or something like that. In this manner, consumers will feel at peace and not mind about privacy because of the company’s good services, putting them in the top ten most trusted companies for privacy.
Definition of Privacy
The problem roots from the varying definitions of the word “privacy” as understood by the consumer or by the company. Every time the customer hears “privacy is important” they would assume that the company meets their broad definition of privacy. But this is not the case. The evil in their motto, “you can make money without doing evil”, actually denotes the old advertising practices; instead of using the old flashy popup ads, they introduced sponsored links – one of the bases of the regulatory standards requiring search engines to separate sponsored links from organic ones.
Google’s advertising techniques a danger to privacy
Google’s advertising methods analyzed from ad clicks may threaten the creative appeals of advertising copywriters, but they say this can stop the fraudulent style of bait and switch, where users are lured into a product but getting a substitute instead. Behavioral advertising created tradeoffs between information collection and better advertising results and Google had to adopt its techniques over the years. In 2008, Google claimed that their technique was different from behavioral targeting since they only capture what the user recently searched as opposed to others who look at what the user did days ago. Google also mentioned about “technological safeguards” for the chat messages and emails in the Gmail accounts, yet they failed to disprove that it is an e-mail service that analyzes the content of the user’s messages to tailor advertising and act as surveillance systems, performing without the knowledge of the users. Their intention of grabbing personal information was clear when they purchased DoubleClick, another means of tracking individuals online. When the Viacom ordered Google to reveal the usage logs of Youtube.com, Google objected, arguing that the combination of IP addresses and usernames could identify individuals who used Youtube, although an engineer of Google concluded that in most cases, IP addresses alone cannot identify an individual.
Summary and Recommendations
To sum things up, Google’s “evil” talk is its burden because people have forgotten how troublesome searching is in the past, and so they associate “evil” as the company’s morality. Google should be reminding us about their contribution to a revolution in search advertising and how their model could give customers tools to avoid fraud like allowing them to tag advertisements as fraudulent. Also, the company should give more depth in their “privacy is important” talks as it leaves many unanswered questions. Google should also allow their victims to transfer all their data from Google’s services to another provider or system and to delete all the data that have been collected in an identifiable way.
