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EPIC Sues FTC Over Google's Planned Privacy Changes
angry tapir writes "The Electronic Privacy Information Center has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, asking a court to force the agency to take action against Google over planned changes in the company's collection of personal data. EPIC, in briefs filed Wednesday, asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to require the FTC to enforce a 2011 privacy agreement between the agency and Google over the company's fumbled rollout of its Buzz social networking service."
Ok, I don't understand. On the one hand, Google is forced to implement a comprehensive privacy program. On the other hand, EPIC complains that Google's new privacy rules are.... too comprehensive? Can someone point me to what is actually changing in the privacy terms that is actually so bad? As far as I can tell, everyone's just complaining that the policies are going to be merged. So instead of having 20 separate privacy policies, now each service is governed by the same. How is that bad?
Just wondering, cuz I seriously don't get the outrage.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Well, IANAL but a priori, it's rather obvious that if you have several privacy policies that aren't exactly the same, then when you replace them all with a single one, you must lose some rights that you had for some services, and possibly gain some other rights that you had for some other services. So you end up with a different mix from what you initially signed up for in a given service. If you were happy with the original policies, you may not like the new ones.
Aw crap! That reads like a lawyer's explanation. When I die, I'll go straight to Hell, and the only computer languages allowed will be Javascript....
Meanwhile: Facebook changes it's privacy policy for the 20th time since the announcement of google's policy change.
Interesting. Marc Rotenberg, President and Executive Director of EPIC served as counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee to PIPA sponsor Patrick Leahy. The very same unconstitutional PIPA that Google just protested against and helped get shut down with your help and mine.
I don't know about you, but a lawyer at counsel who could advise the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee that he could get away with sponsoring a bill that violates not one, but at least two of our human rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights to suit a tiny minority commercial interest might be a wee bit biased.
Odd coincidence, that he's leading the group now suing Google over something or other. How did they expect us to not know that? Do they not have the Google? Are they living in the 1980's still?
In case you don't remember who Senator Leahy is and how he's working against your free speech and due process rights, here's an article with interesting links. Being as how you're reading this though, it's unlikely you don't know this.
And here's former Senator and chairman of the Democratic National Committee Chris Dodd saying if the politicians took the graft they oughtta pass this bill (PIPA and SOPA): link.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Yep, that's certainly the idea. Note that most of Google's existing privacy policies already did give them the ability to share user's data across all its services. For example, YouTube already shows videos that your friends share on Google+. The problem was that they were inconsistent. Google cannot currently share data from YouTube with other sites. Their new policy allows them to do that. This is all explained in their letter to U.S. Congress.
Now what exactly is the problem with this? It seems to me that if Google is going to share my data, there are three sets of people they could share it with:
I see a significant harm if they were to engage in the first two. I don't really have a problem with the third. And this privacy policy specifically prevents them from doing the first two. So what this allows them to do is share my information, from one Google service to another, for the purposes of showing me relevant links and ads. In that case, where is the harm? Further, how am I worse off having, for example, Google search results informed by what YouTube videos I've been watching. It sounds like it could give me more relevant search results.
Further, I would much rather know that anything I upload to any Google service might be used by any other Google service, than have to remember a complex set of rules about which products' privacy policies allow Google to share data with which other products.
What does this mean? What do you mean by "share" in this context? Withhold your Calendar from whom? As far as I am concerned, the only people who have access to my calendar are me and Google's servers. If the Google+ app had access to my calendar (for example, it might show appointments on the side), that doesn't increase the people who have access to my calendar: It's still just me and Google's servers.
Since when did any company give you explicit control over how the data is stored on their servers? With Google's new policy, it is simple: if you use a service, your data for that service will be stored on Google and may be used by any other service within that company (and not sold to third parties). How is that harmful? How is that different to any other company?
Actually yes, if the same username and password is used to log into 2 websites owned by the same company, why would you expect the information NOT to be shared?!?