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Google Faces Privacy Audits For Next 20 Years
Hugh Pickens writes "The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Google has reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over Buzz, a social blogging service the company introduced through Gmail last year. The deal will require that Google have regular, independent privacy audits for the next 20 years. Buzz drew heavy criticism at launch in February 2010 for a glaring privacy flaw. When users turned it on, it suggested people to follow based on their Gmail contacts list and their most frequent email partners. 'Although Google led Gmail users to believe that they could choose whether or not they wanted to join the network, the options for declining or leaving the social network were ineffective,' says the FTC. Along with the 20 year oversight, the settlement also says that Google is barred from misrepresenting privacy or confidentiality of the user information it collects, Google must obtain user consent before sharing their information with third parties if it changes its privacy policy, and Google must establish and maintain a comprehensive privacy program."
Facebook? Hello?
I'd suggest the same with facebook too. I'm not too sure the legality of presenting 12 year old with changes to user agreements, misleading games that collect your info, etc.
At least they are not as evil. The problems with Google Buzz were quite obvious.
Honestly, these kinds of things should be mandatory for any large company with that much personal information. Regular independent audits? Sounds like the kind of oversight we need. Can't lie about how private your info is? Sounds like something that should be a law. Need to get consent again after changing the terms? Again, I'm surprised you could get away with it before.
Now let's just get these things applied everywhere else like Google. Facebook, for one, deserves even more oversight.
Not fair. Google's been a lot better at protecting info than Zuckerberg's famous pig.
...how about getting our own GOVERNMENT to follow these guidelines? I'd have a hard time following an edict by someone who won't follow it themselves.
I know, it's slashdot, but don't dupes usually wait a day or a week before getting posted?
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/03/30/1517238/Google-Agrees-To-Biennial-Privacy-Reviews
---jstlook ---For that is the way of Elves, for they say both yes AND no, and mean every word of it. --- J.R.R.T.
This seems a little excessive to me. They recognized the problem, and took care of it, fairly quick. They didn't realize they had a problem on launch. It seems to MY eyes, that Google TRIES to do the right thing. Unlike Facebook, that does the wrong thing, until OVERWHELMING complaints roll things back. The privacy issues caused by the Buzz launch seemed to not big a big deal, except for a few outliers.
What's amazing to me is that google, being not quite 13 years old, is being slapped with requirements that will extend for 20 years. Who knows, by then they could be a completely different company.
Obvious to you, obvious to me, apparently not obvious to google.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
The soldier who saw everything twice nodded weakly and sank
back on his bed. Yossarian nodded weakly too, eyeing his talented
roomate with great humility and admiration. He knew he was in the
presence of a master. His talented roomate was obviously a person to
be studied and emulated. During the night, his talented roomate died,
and Yossarian decided that he had followed him far enough.
'I see everything once!' he cried quickly.
-- Joseph Heller, Catch-22
What's wrong with permanent long term oversight like that? Privacy is a sensitive thing, and even if Google only makes honest mistakes, such audits would flush them out earlier, minimizing damage.
Only this needs to be applied consistently to all companies dealing wit significant amount of private data - Facebook, MS, Amazon etc.
Evil or not, it's pretty cool to see the US Government siding with consumer privacy against a major corporation. Is this a sign of an attitude change, or merely a sign that Google is (relatively) new and hasn't figured out who they need to bribe yet?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I can't see any reason this shouldn't apply to all companies.
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
Jesus are people still talking about "wireless sniffing" like it's a terrible thing? That's like calling it my fault that I'm forced to smell it when you rip ass.
In fact, that's a more apt analogy than I intended. The recipient has no control, in each case, of whether it gets to them. Can they be faulted for collecting? Sure, it would make them a little creepy if they delibrately inhaled, but there's absolutely no evidence than they intended to. In any case, it's not their fault for having it be there in the first place.
I'm so sick of this WiFi shit. IT'S FUCKING RADIO WAVES! THEY ARE **BROADCASTED**. BROAD ... CAST.... If you don't want it to get out there, then DON'T SPEND MONEY AND ELECTRICITY TO PUT IT OUT THERE! Or at least encrypt it!
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
I have a feeling they're retaining a lot more unnecessary information than google.
Smack their knuckles with a ruler for good measure
Why? Overpunishment is just as unproductive when applied to businesses as it is to poor, desperate saps. And "now don't you do that again, Google!" is a reasonable response when you have, as in this case, a reasonable expectation that Google indeed won't do it again.
pipe down buster. easy. easy ....
Read radical news here
Not only were google inhaling, they were jaring it otherwise how could someone prove google sniffed it to start with? If they had no intention to further inhale from the source then why were they storing what they sniffed? If they never had any intention to retrieve the "ass ripping" output then why even walk around sniffing for it?
I don't care if google has an affinity for a bit of sniffing and the bystanders were caught with their pants down but to say google didn't intend to inhale just seems a bit naive to me.
If I was witty I'd put something funny here but, as it stands, I am not and have just wasted seconds of your life
Yes, and it will be so easy enforce and verify.. What they got caught with so far amounts maybe to one one thousandth of what they have. This is a silly distraction. You will not have privacy on a networked computer.. never...
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
They didn't, or at least there's absolutely no evidence that they did. On the contrary, actually, the software they were using (Kismet) saves unencrypted packets by default. You have to go and turn it off. So it sounds to me like they forgot to do that, which is something that I've done myself so I can relate.
Add to that the fact that *nobody knew about this* until Google said "yeah, we did this by accident and we're deleting it". If they were trying to be sneaky and collect people's information, why would they come and reveal something that had been a secret? That's not how I hush something up, that's how I try to stave off potential misunderstandings. But apparently it didn't work.
I guess the lesson here is that when corporations screw something up, they should never come clean and instead just hush it up. At least that way they stand a chance of not being ripped apart for it. Frankly, I thought we wanted to discourage that behavior as a society, but maybe that's just me.
I think Google makes a good search engine and good products, and I am happy to "pay" my eyeballs and habits for that. But I am *very* wary of the amount of power they have, so I watch their actions very closely. I have seen no evidence for more than 5 years that they are anything other than upstanding - and like I said the bar has been set higher for them. In fact, when stuff like the WiFi thing above, and the Buzz thing in the OP is the worst anybody can come up with, I'm pretty confident that they're not a "bad guy".
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Troll? Come on, it was more like a flamebait (though I'd argue it was just flame...:p ). Troll means something, people.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
From the article:
"The proposed settlement bars Google from misrepresenting the privacy or confidentiality of individualsâ(TM) information or misrepresenting compliance with the U.S.-E.U Safe Harbor or other privacy, security, or compliance programs."
I am confused. The article is from the FTC itself, so it seems unlikely that they got this part wrong.
Is this really saying that companies are not, by default, barred from misrepresenting their handling of individuals' information?
That seems so strikingly wrong that I am having a hard time believing that I am reading it correctly.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
My conclusion after reading this. They didn't pay enough on lobbyists. This of course is scary once you see how much they already pay for lobbying and how fast its grown. Here's the question I pose to you. Is Google, the company of do no evil, doing evil by putting this many resources towards these efforts or is that just par for the course when you get that big?
Do less evil....
(meant to poke fun - I actually like Google)
Place nail here >+
Evil or not, it's pretty cool to see the US Government siding with consumer privacy against a major corporation. Is this a sign of an attitude change, or merely a sign that Google is (relatively) new and hasn't figured out who they need to bribe yet?
Or its just a cover for a secret agreement to feed everything they collect to a bunch of three letter agencies bypassing all judicial oversight.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I think Google makes a good search engine and good products, and I am happy to "pay" my eyeballs and habits for that.
I wish they would offer a simple option to pay with money instead and gave a binding guarantee of absolutely no advertising, data mining, sharing or storage of log info beyond the barest minimum required for technical (troubleshooting, et al) reasons, like 7 days or so.
I'd gladly pay 50+ bucks/year for something like that with
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
It amazes me that in 2011, anyone is still willingly giving their personal data over to internet data miners. In 2000 I might have understood it for general lack of awareness about the extent of it. But it's been the lead story on bloody CNN on many occasions. It isn't a mystery now to anyone who hasn't been living in a cave for the last decade.
Exactly. I know how much of my data companies like Google and Facebook have -- a fuckton. And you know how much that concerns me? Very little. What's the big deal? Why are people so hellbent on keeping things private? Newsflash: GOOGLE DOES NOT CARE ABOUT YOUR DATA, ONLY DATA. Nobody at Google is reading through your emails or browsing habits. It's all automated. Nobody knows anything about you because nobody cares about you.
I'm going to side with the argument that Google hasn't paid them enough or given them what they wanted.
The US Government isn't exactly a huge privacy advocate. Oh, unless it pertains to their own bullshit.
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.
Unless of course you happened to be a jaded employee that gets all upset over people deleting him from their contact lists and you have the equivalent of GOD power in terms of access. Yep. Happened at Google.
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.
I'm not sure it's excessive & I can even see it being used as a selling point; not too much different than seeing on a meat package "Packed under constant supervision of the USDA".
"Googles privacy practices are scrutinized by the US Government and we are the only online service provider who can offer that assurance"
Yep, it's "my fault" that when I took photos from a public street for the purposes of collecting data on house exterior colors that I caught photos of you jerking off to animal porn because you had the blinds open and just trusted that nobody would look.
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.
Perhaps you and your data are already worth more than "50+ bucks/year."
Kid-proof tablet..
I am not sure its a sound expansion of FTC powers to start conducting privacy audits of companies. If they are going to do it though Google is really the least of my concerns. I'd like to see Financials, Insurers, Cellular Carriers, and Utilities audited more so than Google. Google is going to use the information they have on me to try and market stuff to me and of course there is a risk it could get leaker. Those other guys are all in a position to do things of much greater consequence to my life with that same data and if anything more likely to leak it.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
This is almost a false dichotomy like the current US political party situation.
Trying to stay even handed, I absolutely agree that Google is *one of* the companies that needs privacy oversight.
But then one of the Google SuperLawyers needs to turn this around into a precedent, so that the other 10 (more?) companies that need oversight get it.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
You mean meet the moronic researcher whose "deep investigation" couldn't notice that the false positive given by his antivirus hit a windows localization folder and just test the file in question on a different scanner?
"Google has the only government-reviewed privacy and security policy."
Perhaps you and your data are already worth more than "50+ bucks/year."
Not with adblock installed and me only using their generic services - google sells eyeballs but they aren't selling mine. At best I'm worth a few bucks to them as part of trend analysis.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.