"Someone's been reading your email."
Google privacy policy: a stranglehold most users are happy to be held in
The free services Google provides are seen as justification enough to allow it to monetise the data gathered in the process
James Ball
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 1 March 2012 14.14 GMT
http://www.guardian.co.uk/techno ... acy-policy-analysis
Someone's been reading your email. They know what you've been looking at online. They almost certainly have a photograph of your house. If you've got a smartphone, they even know where you've been and what you'll be doing next week.
It's not a new hacking saga, though; it's the standard business practices of the ubiquitous internet firm Google, which from Thursday will, for the first time, be able to join together everything it knows about you to customise its services and hone its advertising more effectively.
There's a mantra in certain online communities which says if you're getting a service for free, you are not that company's customer – you're the product. Google's core product is its huge wealth of information on the people who use its services, which allows for the sale of highly targeted and effective advertisements to those same people.
The company has no shortage of information to collect. Google has a 78% share of the search engine market, dwarfing by far its nearest rival, Baidu, the Chinese search operator. Around 350 million people use its gmail product, and some 3bn videos are played every day on YouTube, which is owned by Google.
It has around half of the global smartphone market and can collect location information from these devices. It even has a fifth of all internet browsers and almost half of the online advertising share.
Google has been able to use the troves of information collected from these platforms for a long time. Its computers "read" the content of all its users' emails to hone the adverts that run in the email window. Search engine history is used to learn about what kind of person you are and how you use the web, to bettertarget adverts so they deliver better results.
From this week, all this information can be linked together. Information gained from your phone could be used to deliver a local ad in your online search results. A YouTube history consisting of karaoke singalongs may be used to inform recommendations of nearby bars on your smartphone. An email to a friend saying "I'm pregnant!" could conceivably lead to some maternity-wear ads elsewhere.
Google says its changes to privacy policies are largely aimed at simplification. Each of its 70-plus services has had a separate policy until now, and these are being amalgamated into one. The policy will increase Google's ability to make money from its audience, but also improve the personal service it delivers to users. There is a win-win side to the changes.
But not everyone is convinced. There is to be a European investigation of Google's new policy to see if it complies with tough Europe-wide data protection regulations. Others are troubled by the slow creep of Google's collated information and how it uses it – never moving in big steps, but always advancing.
Google has run foul of regulators on several occasions for collecting too much data. Its Street View service – which takes pictures of millions of streets around the world and ties them with its mapping service – was taken to the supreme court in Germany for invasion of privacy in 2011. Google won its case, but abandoned plans to expand the service in Germany, partly because of this opposition.
Street View faced another scandal when it emerged that private details of people's wi-fi networks were being collected by its camera cars, leading to all such data collection being stopped. Last year, the Guardian revealed that Google – just like Apple – had been tracking the movements of people using its Android smartphones.
One fear for Google's rivals is that its huge reach across search, mobile, video, social networking and advertising makes its vast cache of information almost impossible for smaller or more focused rivals to compete against.
Its dossier of information on users also proves a source of concern to online activists. The company, whose headquarters is in California, is subject to search orders from the US government for any user, regardless of their nationality. Like other online businesses, Google complies with orders from governments. This was seen in a high-profile subpoeana for the email records of the WikiLeaks supporter Jacob Applebaum. If a subpoena is sealed, a user may never even be told their details have been handed over. Google is, however, transparent in revealing how many information requests it gets. Between January and June 2011, it was asked by governments for data on 25,000 of its users worldwide, and complied in handing over the information in around 19,000 of the cases. The US government asked for details on 11,057 users, while the UK asked for 1,444.
It's possible for users to opt out of Google's new privacy policy – at least partially – although it's fiddly to do. This prevents the information being used for advertising purposes and means it will be made anonymous after 18 months, but it doesn't prevent access by authorities.
A small rival search service, DuckDuckGo, is marketing itself through a policy of not tracking its users nor tailoring results to individuals (known as "bubbling"), which it says can lead to users being shown only information they agree with, rather than seeing the full plethora of opinion on the web.
For most users, however, there is clearly an acceptance of the trade-off of receiving high-quality, innovative, web services for free in exchange for giving the company the right to make money from the information it gathers in the process. This is the trade-off that makes the free web work – including the Guardian.
The concern unique to Google is its scale. Opting out of the Guardian is relatively straightforward, but avoiding Google is far more difficult.
For a young company, Google has come a long way. Its early and famous mantra of "don't be evil" evolved into an "evil scale" in 2006, when it decided that offering filtered search results in China was the lesser of two evils, and so acceptable.
The decision for Google's users with this new privacy change, and others in the future that will doubtless follow, is whether the company remains the lesser of evils – and whether they're willing to forgo the services it so ably provides if they feel it's not. | |
