Policy Primer

Google‟s Privacy Policy

Google‟s Privacy Policy

• By using Google, you automatically accept their „Terms of Service‟ (TOS) (Google 2009)

• Included in TOS, is Google‟s „Privacy Policy‟ (Google 2009)

• This presentation will summarise key features and related issues of Google‟s Privacy Policy

What does Google know about you?

“Google knows more about you than your own

mother” Kevin Bankston , Electronic Frontier Foundation ( in Mitchell 2009 )

If you use Then Google knows about…

Search Engine All of your search history

Any activity on partner Websites

Chrome Browser Every website you have entered into „Omnibox‟

GMail All of your email communication

Calendar All of your appointments

Google Voice Who you are calling & the transcripts of these conversations

Picasa Web Albums Photographs of you, your friends & family Face-recognition technology to identify new photos of your friends & family

Google Books What you have read, what you annotated, how long you spent reading

Table: Mitchell 2009

How does Google collect information ?

• Information you provide - Personal information through service sign up (eg email).

• Cookies – Google site sends a small file to your computer to identify your browser.

• Cookies are used to track user trends, assist advertisers to target users by creating profiles and storing users preferences (such as peoples search habits).

How does Google collect information?

• Log information - Google's server automatically records information such as your search query, IP address & time and date of your request

• This information creates a digital diary of your online activities

How does Google collect information?

Additional modes of collection of data include:

• User communications: Communication sent to and from Google (inquiries, requests etc)

• Affiliated sites – Personal information about you that you provide to affiliated sites may be sent to Google in order to create a better profile of your digital habits

• Gadgets – Information collected by a gadget is sent to Google as above

• Location data – Google maps for example, if you have used these devices, your GPS location will be kept by Google

• Links – clicking links from the Google page will be tracked

Privacy concerns with logging & storing personal information

• Potential Issues – Google records your search information history, and after 9 months it „anonymizes‟ these records (so they cannot be linked to your IP address).

• In Pre-digital culture, unless you were under surveillance, there would be no way to determine what you were doing at any given time.

• In the digital world, people leave a digital imprint of what their online transactions were at any given time at any given day. We have now moved from being „monitored‟ to now being „searchable‟ (Lessig 1998).

Privacy concerns with logging & storing personal information

• Privacy laws were developed in a pre-digital age, before new technologies were developed, and are somewhat lost when governing social issues effecting the digital age (Lessig 1998).

• By Google keeping logs of transaction records , there is major concerns of what may be done with this data in the future.

Other search engines:

Deletes search history after 18 months

Yahoo anonymizes search queries and

other log data after 3 months

Doesn't store users' IP addresses at all

Source: Mitchell 2009

Information Sharing

Who is this information shared with?

• Other businesses/persons who may process personal information on behalf of Google

• Any government agency (U.S. or otherwise) so long as Google has a "good faith" belief that such action is necessary (Johnson 2009)

• Third Parties may receive aggregated, non-personal information (for example: number of users who searched for a particular term, or how many users clicked on an advertisement)

What is “Aggregated, non-personal information” ?

• Google definition: “information that is recorded about users and collected into groups so that it no longer reflects or references an individually identifiable user”

• AOL accidentally released search log data from 650,000 users in 2006 (Mitchell 2009).

• A reporter was able to track down an AOL user using only this „unidentifiable‟ data (Barbaro and Zeller 2006).

• The user was a 68 year old widow, who was completely unaware that her search histories were being recorded and used to form an „anonymous‟ profile.

The unintended consequences of storing this type of data has been said to be ….

“a ticking privacy time bomb”

(Marc Rotenberg, Electronic Privacy information Centre in Barbaro and Zeller 2006)

Collecting information and supplying this data to “third parties”

• “An Internet user‟s every movement is potentially a piece of marketing data.” (Brown & Muchira 2004)

• Information that is collected has an unlimited value and can be passed from firm to firm, matched to numerous databases, and create infinite consumer profiles (Prabhaker 2000 in Brown & Muchira 2004).

• Whilst Google notifies users through their Privacy Policy that their data may be passed onto “third parties” is it ethical to profit from this exchange, if users are technically unaware (Szoka 2009) ?

• 11 March 2009 Google announced its launch of „internet based advertising‟ -highly targeted ads based on who you are (your user profile) and your activity history on the Web (Mitchell 2009)

BibliographyBarbaro, M., & Zeller, T. (2006, August 9th). A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749. New York Times.

Available: http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/AOL/exhibit_d.pdf

Brown, M., & Muchira, R. (2004). Investigating the Relationship between Internet Privacy Concern and Online Purchase Behaviour. Journal of Electronic Commerce Research, 591), 62-70.Available: http://www.csulb.edu/web/journals/jecr/issues/20041/Paper6.pdf

Google Graphic [Image] (n.d) Retrieved September 10, 2009, from http://www.google.com.au/

Google‟s Privacy Policy (2009). Retrieved September 1, 2009, from http://www.google.com.au/intl/en/privacypolicy.html

Google „s Terms of Service (2009). Retrieved September 1, 2009, from http://www.google.com.au/accounts/TOS

Ixquick Graphic [Image] (n.d) Retrieved September 15, 2009, from http://www.ixquick.com/

Johna Till Johnson. (2009, June). Too few fighting the good fight on privacy. Network World ,15. Retrieved September 30, 2009, from ProQuest Computing. (Document ID: 1755300491).

Lessig, L. (1998). The Architecture of Privacy. Available: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/works/lessig/architecture_priv.pdf.

Microsoft Graphic [Image] (n.d) Retrieved September 15, 2009, from http://www.microsoft.com

Mitchell, R.. (2009). What Google knows about you. Computerworld, 43(18), 15-16,18,20. Retrieved September 30, 2009, from ABI/INFORM Global. (Document ID: 1711808931).

Szoka, B.. (2009). Google's Ad Preference Manager: One Small Step for Google, One Giant Leap for Privacy. SSRN Working Paper Series. Retrieved September 30, 2009, from ABI/INFORM Global. (Document ID: 1781041251).

Yahoo Graphic [Image] (n.d) Retrieved September 15, 2009, from http://au.yahoo.com/

Zittrain, J. (2009) „Lost in the Cloud‟ The New York Times, 19 July, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/opinion/20zittrain.html?tntemail1=y&_r=2&emc=tnt&pagewanted=all