Last month, leaders from 10 countries co-authored a letter to Google criticizing the company’s handling of privacy concerns when rolling out new technologies. On Friday, Google sent a response to that letter, which it identified as an “invitation to us to reiterate our core commitments to privacy”.
Google’s response does little to address the primary concerns put forth in that original letter, but reads more like a public relations form-letter on the company’s privacy practices.
In its response, Google says that it has five privacy principles that describe how it approaches “privacy and user information”:
- Use information to provide our users with valuable products and services.
- Develop products that reflect strong privacy standards and practices.
- Make the collection of personal information transparent.
- Give users meaningful choices to protect their privacy.
- Be a responsible steward of the information we hold.
The letter then points to Google Dashboard as one of Google’s “industry-leading tools to provide users with greater transparency and control.” According to Google, Dashboard was launched just six months ago and is accessed by around 100,000 unique visitors a day, with 85% of those being first time visitors.
The original letter to Google, however, specifically condemned the Buzz launch and made a series of requests of Google in future dealings.
The privacy problems associated with your initial global rollout of Google Buzz on February 9, 2010 were serious and ought to have been readily apparent to you.
In essence, you took Google Mail (Gmail), a private, one-to-one web-based e-mail service, and converted it into a social networking service, raising concern among users that their personal information was being disclosed. Google automatically assigned users a network of “followers” from among people with whom they corresponded most often on Gmail, without adequately informing Gmail users about how this new service would work or providing sufficient information to permit informed consent decisions. This violated the fundamental principle that individuals should be able to control the use of their personal information.
Users instantly recognized the threat to their privacy and the security of their personal information, and were understandably outraged. To your credit, Google apologized and moved quickly to stem the damage.
In addition to its critique of the Buzz rollout, the letter asserted that “Privacy cannot be sidelined in the rush to introduce new technologies to online audiences around the world.” It noted that Google Buzz was not an isolated case, with similar concerns being raised in several countries over Google Street View.
Google’s response to this?
Of course we do not get everything 100% right — that is why we acted so quickly on Google Buzz following the user feedback we received.
Overall, Google’s response reads as a laundry list of online locations where the company either speaks to privacy concerns or allows users to control their privacy settings, but does little to directly address the concerns voiced by the 10 data protection commissioners. Will its next product launch publicly expose our search histories, so long as we are provided “with valuable products and services”? Not getting everything 100% right is very different from obviously exposing private information for all the world to see.
