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Worst Companies At Protecting User Privacy: Skype, Verizon, Yahoo
First time accepted submitter SmartAboutThings writes "Apple and Microsoft are one of the worst companies at protecting our privacy, according to EFF's privacy report. Dropbox, Twitter and Sonic have some of the best scores." "Sonic" is California ISP Sonic.net, which tops the field with the EFF's only 4-star rating. Of ISPs with national presence, ATT and Comcast come in with a single star apiece, and Verizon gets a goose egg.
Sonic is like the Linux of ISPs. First of all, they run Linux for everything. They refuse to institute a bandwidth cap. They still offer Usenet feeds. Their bonded ASDL service is kick ass (the modems, however, leave something to be desired). It's cheap to buy a dedicated IP address (in fact, I think it's free, now), and you can even setup reverse DNS on your account management page! Basically, best ISP ever.
And now they're in race with AT&T to install fiber in San Francisco.
Google doesn't share any of your information with advertisers or other third-parties; their privacy policy is very clear on this. It's also totally obvious from a business perspective, because handing off that information to advertisers would be handing out a key business advantage for free. Goggle is not stupid.
As for government data requests, they publish the exact numbers and the percentage of requests they complied with. Based on the numbers it's pretty clear they fight many of the requests they get (e.g. all 42 requests from the Russian government have been denied this year). You can look at the numbers yourself: http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/userdatarequests/
Even though I'm confident you're either trying to be funny or are trolling, I'll respond in detail for the benefit of anyone else who might be ignorant on this topic.
To cherry-pick just a small handful of examples from Slashdot's archives:
1) Tracking us: Beacon, more tracking, requests for FTC audit regarding cookie usage and privacy, even more tracking, violating European laws by tracking on third-party sites, filing a patent to track us on other sites, not answering Congressional questions regarding whether they are tracking users still, $15 bn lawsuit for illegal tracking
2) Sharing with third-parties: Facebook Sharing, sharing pics with advertisers, three US Senators telling Facebook to quit sharing data, sharing IDs with third parties so they can be tracked, home addresses and phone numbers, a bug exposed millions of accounts of personal details
3) Automatically making data public: News Feed, Facebook Connect, crap like this, settled with the FTC after making information that was set to private go public on numerous occasions, and agreed to not do it again
There are dozens, if not hundreds of more examples of Facebook being slimy or criminal in their behavior if you just do a search for "Facebook privacy" here.