Category: War on Privacy

A new survey by the Pew Charitable Trusts has found that Americans still care about online privacy:

Even though Americans like search engines and they really like Google, they don’t like targeted ads or personalized search results.

Nearly three-quarters of search engine users surveyed say they don’t want search engines to mine their personal information to tailor results to their interests, something Google has been doing since January.

More than two-thirds say they don’t want to be tracked on the Web or have ads targeted to them.

Google, of course, is betting that people will still continue to use its offerings despite whatever misgivings they may have about the company’s policies. That’s why it has continued waging its war on user privacy.

But increasingly, there is pushback. It used to be that Google could get away with a lot. But these days, when the company makes a move, it gets noticed and reported. And consumer protection groups register their concerns or opposition. That’s progress. That’s a good thing. European regulators have already concluded that Google’s new unified privacy policy violates European laws, and they’re initiating a probe which could be the precursor to litigation. A group of state attorney generals has also condemned Google’s consolidation of privacy policies from its different products into one as “an invasion of privacy”.

Sam Varghese explains his decision to cut ties and Leave Google Behind:

Last week I shut down the last of my three Gmail accounts. From 2007, to a greater or lesser extent, these three accounts were used for various purposes, initially enthusiastically, later reluctantly.

Why get away from Gmail altogether? The company has always been snooping on email and feeding through advertisements based on keywords in the mail. But from March 1, the spying will become over-arching, ostensibly to provide a better customer experience.

I want no part of it.

He adds, eloquently:

The internet existed long before Google did. It is built on free and open source software, with protocols that are open as well. Genuine geeks and nerds did the building without any thought of making money.

Now we have advertising and marketing companies masquerading as technology companies and trying to squeeze every stray dollar, rouble, pound, euro and dirham out of people. And doing it under the guise of “improving the customer experience”.

No one company should be allowed to monopolise the services on the net and milk user data to sell its ads or any other service or product. There’s a time to wake up and for me that time is now.

If more people came to this conclusion every day, Google would find it much harder to wage its war on privacy. We need more people to wake up and realize what’s happening. Everyone should care about user privacy and what companies like Google do with their data. Everyone should be cognizant of the consequences of oversharing.

Google critic Daniel Brandt, the proprietor of Google Watch and Scroogle, confirmed today that he has taken down the latter site – and possibly the former as well – “forever”:

Scroogle, the search engine operated by privacy militant and self-appointed Wikipedia watchdog Daniel Brandt, has folded for real. After enduring DDOS attacks “around the clock” that sent a flood of unsustainable traffic to his servers, Mr. Brandt took down the search engine along with his other four domains, namebase.org, google-watch.org, cia-on-campus.org, and book-grab.com. His theory is that he was being attacked by hackers with a personal vendetta.

“These four domains had also been on the web for a long time — NameBase first went online in 1997, and before that had been available on telnet since 1995. I spent 27 years developing NameBase,” he said in an email, and referred to the Wikipedia page.

“I no longer have any domains online,” Mr. Brandt wrote. “I also took all my domains out of DNS because I want to signal to the criminal element that I have no more servers to trash. This hopefully will ward off further attacks on my previous providers.”

Unfortunately, since Brandt has deliberately excluded all of his sites from the Internet Archive (which can be done using a robots.txt file directive), there isn’t a copy of his site out there that we can link to for archival purposes. Which means all of Brandt’s criticism of Google is effectively gone, except for what may remain in search engine caches and privately-created mirrors.

While we can respect Daniel’s wish to go dark, it would be nice if he would be willing to donate his collection of web pages to a university, consumer watchdog group, or other appropriate steward that they remain available to people who want to learn about Google’s war on privacy.

Google Watch was one of the first sites established devoted principally to criticism of Google. It ceased receiving substantive and regular updates several years ago, but it was still a valuable resource. Unfortunately, it has now disappeared.

With Google Watch gone, LGB’s existence has arguably become more important. Leave Google Behind isn’t going anywhere, either. This site will remain online and accessible indefinitely so that those who wish to part ways with Google and find alternatives to its spyware-laden offerings can continue to do so.

Another chapter in the Monster of Mountain View’s War on Privacy is now being written:

Google Inc. and other advertising companies have been bypassing the privacy settings of millions of people using Apple Inc.’s Web browser on their iPhones and computers—tracking the Web-browsing habits of people who intended for that kind of monitoring to be blocked.

The companies used special computer code that tricks Apple’s Safari Web-browsing software into letting them monitor many users. Safari, the most widely used browser on mobile devices, is designed to block such tracking by default.

Google disabled its code after being contacted by The Wall Street Journal.

Google would have no doubt been happy to continue exploiting the Safari loophole – which was discovered by Stanford grad student Jonathan Meyer – but it needed to contain the bad publicity, so it told the Journal it was removing the offending code. That hasn’t stopped privacy activists and consumer advocates from giving Google a well-deserved, harsh scolding.

“Google has clearly engaged in ‘unfair and deceptive’ practices,” said John M. Simpson, Consumer Watchdog’s Privacy Project director. “They have been lying about how people can protect their privacy in their instructions about how to opt out of receiving targeted advertising.”

“The original Google statement that users of Safari who have not changed their privacy settings ‘accomplishes the same thing as setting the opt-out cookie’ is a per se misrepresentation. Not only did the company know this not to be true, it took elaborate measures to circumvent the Safari privacy safeguards, and it benefited from the misrepresentations by the commercial value it surreptitiously obtained. The fact that Google removed the evidence and made it no longer available by means of a Google search (think about that for a moment) is an admission by the company as to its malfeasance,” EPIC’s Marc Rotenberg wrote in a letter to the Federal Trade Commission.

“Coming on the heels of Google’s controversial decision to tear down the privacy-protective walls between some of its other services, this is bad news for the company,” agreed staffers with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “It’s time for Google to acknowledge that it can do a better job of respecting the privacy of Web users. One way that Google can prove itself as a good actor in the online privacy debate is by providing meaningful ways for users to limit what data Google collects about them. Specifically, it’s time that Google’s third-party web servers start respecting Do Not Track requests, and time for Google to offer a built-in Do Not Track option.”

The problem, of course, is that Google isn’t interested in doing a better job of respecting the privacy of Web users. It’s trying to do away with the very idea. And unless users take a stand by choosing to stop doing business with Google – as we have – it may very well succeed.

What will be next? A test of facial recognition technology? The Monster of Mountain View is doing all it can to destroy user privacy as we know it. This is just the latest proof.

Google is working to collect information about Internet users that it can’t get from just monitoring its own browser, services, and Android devices. The company has set up a new program called Screenwise, which offers money to users who install a black box on their home network to “measure Internet use.” A smaller amount of money will go to those who install a browser extension on their computers that will do the same thing.

Google quietly started up the Screenwise data collection program Tuesday night, taking the e-mail addresses of people who are interested in “add[ing] a browser extension that will share with Google the sites you visit and how you use them.” For their participation, Google offers the extension users a $5 Amazon gift card for signing up and another $5 gift card for every three months they stay with the program. Less publicly, Google also started looking for people who would install a piece of hardware on their network to do more extensive monitoring.

Daniel Brandt, who runs Google Watch, foresaw the eventuality of a device like this. In his satirical images gallery, he has a photo of a USB dongle called the GooSniff. It doesn’t exactly correspond to Google’s new black box for snooping, but it’s not far off.

Of course, this is a voluntary program. Unlike many of Google’s other spying activities, it’s opt-in. But that’s because it would be illegal for Google to forcibly install little black boxes in the home offices of every American household. To attract sheep – er, participants – Google is offering a small payout. The cost to them is small, and the potential payoff (in terms of the data collected) is huge.

The more data Google can collect, the better. That’s what they are after. And unless they are stopped, they will become a bigger threat to the privacy and security of millions of Americans than the National Security Agency.

We hate to say, we told you so, but… we told you so!

In a move that could make it harder for Google users to remain anonymous, Google Inc. said it would start combining nearly all the information it has on its users.

This could mean, for instance, that when users search via Google, the company will use their activities on sister sites like Gmail and YouTube to influence those users’ search results. Google hasn’t done that before.

Google’s move—which was disclosed in a privacy policy that will take effect on March 1—is a sign of the fierce competition between Google and Facebook Inc. over personal data. Facebook has amassed an unprecedented amount of data about the lives of its more than 800 million members—information that is coveted by advertisers.

Years ago, Google began morphing from a search and advertising company into a tracking company that controls a vast treasure trove of information about people. This site, Leave Google Behind, was created as a response to the beginning of that metamorphosis. Since LGB’s founding almost three years ago, we have faithfully chronicled Google’s increasingly well-waged war on privacy, which the Monster of Mountain View seems determined to continue, one odious move at a time.

It should be obvious by now that many of Google’s offerings don’t directly generate revenue and have nothing to do with its core business. Consider Chrome, Google’s browser. Google doesn’t make money on Chrome. But it is able to use Chrome to track the web surfing habits of millions of people. Google made Chrome by taking freely available open source software, making some improvements, and adding a proprietary payload of spyware on top. That payload is distributed with each copy of Google Chrome. But of course, it is missing from community builds of Chromium, because Google has no interest in open-sourcing its spyware.

Chrome and other offerings are intended to expand Google’s reach, so the Monster of Mountain View knows more about everybody. Google’s own executives have admitted this. On multiple occasions.

“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions…They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next… We know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are.“

– Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, August 14th, 2010

Fortunately, Google’s war on privacy is starting to receive more pushback. The European Union is weighing a strong new user data privacy law that companies like Google would be required to comply with. The current incarnation of the law has some particularly strong and useful provisions in it. Perhaps if Europe can act, it will help at least spark a conversation about something similar in the U.S.

A Network World editor who normally writes about Microsoft has chronicled several alarming tales which describe how the Monster of Mountain View is taking its data-mining to the next level. Here’s story one:

For a few months, whenever this editor used Google search, Google would show him relevant tweets from people he was following on his Twitter account within search results. But, he never actually gave Google his Twitter handle. In fact, it would always ask him to verify his Twitter name even as it served up the Tweets. Google was guessing about his Twitter identity, probably using the fact that the editor gave Twitter his Gmail account. Google saw messages from that Twitter account coming into his Gmail, correlated the two and started serving up unasked for Tweets. Yes, Google is correlating your Google profile with data from public social networks. You must opt out if you want it to cut it out.

Story two:

As for my story, a couple of weeks ago I fired up my Gmail and noticed my name with a little “plus” sign at the top. It turns out it was a Google+ account and Google had filled what it could of my public profile with the data I had shared when I tried out Buzz. This was not my full real name but the name I had been using with all my Google accounts. No one I knew was on Plus yet, so a few days later, I returned, found a few co-workers and tried to post a “hello world” status update. I got an error message. The message didn’t tell me I was banned … it simply said that it couldn’t post my status at this time and I should try again later. Which I did, several times … to the same effect.

After trying everything I could think of, I thought Plus was either ridiculously hard to use or just plain broken (when in truth, the answer was neither, as my account had been suspended).

A few days later, when it still wasn’t fixed, I tried to update my profile and when I hit save, I was finally told what the problem was. It didn’t like my name. I was told the account was being investigated for possible violations for Google’s profile policies.

Story three:

So I posted a photo. I was horrified to discover that although I had set the privacy settings on my photos to default to be visible only to specific circles, the photo was marked as publicly visible. No amount of searching or clicking would get Google to declare that photo not public. I was even more horrified to discover that the photo somehow geolocated itself to the exact location it was taken … which is amazingly creepy as it was taken on a trail in a state park on the iPhone of a friend and sent as a text to my Android phone.

What Julie (the author of the above stories) calls “watching” or “correlating”, we call data-mining. Data-mining is the harmful, invasive activity that underpins pretty much Google’s entire business model. Data-mining means stitching together publicly-available information about people with information that people have volunteered to either Google or its partners at some point to create nearly complete profiles. The commercial purpose of the profiles is to make it possible to serve up behavioral advertising.

Google believes that by destroying the privacy of billions of people, it can reap more than a tidy profit. Its settings to allow people to opt out are just a sop to pacify people who would be otherwise critical of the company.

Google knows it doesn’t have any chance of mollifying its real critics. But right now, it’s not too concerned about this since it has more (deluded) fans than critics.

As long as Google can get away with quietly encroaching upon people’s privacy and making loss of privacy the new norm, it will.

Google chairman Eric Schmidt has already admitted that the Monster of Mountain View has developed facial recognition technology it hasn’t released because it is too creepy. But of course, that research hasn’t been destroyed. It’s still there. Google could start putting this technology into its Picasa offering anytime it wanted – or create new offerings that use it. It’s likely only a matter of time before that happens.

Microsoft may not be a privacy watchdog, but somebody inside the company definitely agrees with us that Gmail is creepy:

On July 20 during the MGX opening sessions, the Softies showed off their “Gmail Man” spoof, meant to spur the troops selling Office 365 against Google Apps, and specifically, Gmail. In the video, Gmail man riffles through mail to find keywords for serving up ads. The message: Google cares more about advertising revenues than privacy.

ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley couldn’t get Microsoft to confirm that the video is legit. But it seems to be. It would have more credibility coming from an organization like Consumer Watchdog than a Google rival (in this case, Microsoft, which has its own free, ad-supported email service – Hotmail).

The video itself is well-done, and manages to be funny and sobering at the same time.

Google is adopting another privacy-encroaching, opt-out, Facebook-style policy:

The purpose of Google Profiles is to enable you to manage your online identity. Today, nearly all Google Profiles are public. We believe that using Google Profiles to help people find and connect with you online is how the product is best used. Private profiles don’t allow this, so we have decided to require all profiles to be public.

Keep in mind that your full name and gender are the only required information that will be displayed on your profile; you’ll be able to edit or remove any other information that you don’t want to share.

If you currently have a private profile but you do not wish to make your profile public, you can delete your profile. Or, you can simply do nothing. All private profiles will be deleted after July 31, 2011.

What they really meant to say was that private profiles – and privacy in general, for that matter – just don’t fit in with their business model of monetizing people.

People who care about their privacy should stay away from Google’s offerings.

Our front page provides a pretty exhaustive guide which explains how users can Leave Google Behind. Many of the alternatives to Google’s products aren’t well known, which is why we’ve gone to the trouble of listing some of them. We encourage you to try them out for yourself. The Web’s a big place… discover how much fun it is to explore it without Google.