

Google’s New Open Source Privacy Effort Looks Back to the 60s - ismavis
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/11/07/googles-new-open-source-privacy-effort-looks-back-to-the-60s/

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chestnut-tree
This is encouraging news.

Google amasses absolutely gargantuan volumes of data about people's online
behaviour. Yet, their privacy policy remains very poor [1].

If you have a Google account, Google has your name, date-of-birth, gender, and
(possibly) mobile phone number. Couple that with the searches and sites you
visit and that is incredibly personal information about you.

Yet, in their privacy policy, Google fails to mention:

\- whether the data they collect about you is anonymised (and what they
anonymise)

\- how long they keep your data for

\- whether the data they collect about you is disasscociated from your
identity

\- who sees your data at Google. GMail automates scanning of your emails. Does
this hold true for all the other data they hold about you? After all, your
activity across the web is arguably just as personal and private.

Google also states that you can delete your web history but fails to confirm
if that data is wiped from Google's servers or merely from your dashboard.

It's depressing how easily Google gets a free pass on matters of privacy.

I challenge anyone to explain why you would purposely omit the information
listed above. It is exactly what you would expect to find in a privacy policy,
especially from a company that arguably tracks online behaviour more than
anyone else.

[1]
[https://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/policies/privacy/](https://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/policies/privacy/)

