Sphinn - Google Responds To Rep. Joe Barton's 24 Privacy Questions

30
Sphinn It!

Google Responds To Rep. Joe Barton's 24 Privacy Questions

Went Hot: December 24, 2007 - 8:52 am
Posted By: scottclark 561 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://searchengineland.com)
Category: Google Other

Joe Barton's 24 Privacy Questions. Google's now replied to the letter with a 19-page response with answers. Data retention, personal data, geolocation, anonymousization of IP addresses, and behavioral search are all included.

4 Comments

Who Desphunn This (0)

Comments

from Vince 561 days ago #

Votes: 1 | Vote:

+ -

Actually many of these things has been told in the last peter fleischertalk. Honestly I am not the biggest fan of google lately. Anyway some funny points :

Question 3, to justify the 18 month retention :"One method of detecting new illicit behaviors is to compare old data with new data.". I guess you shouldn't chane your habits to fast, otherwise google will think your behavior is illicit.

Question 11b : "An IP address cannot necessarily be tied to any individual user or even to an individual machine". Isn'it Jamie Thomas argument? I thought things were pretty clear about that point.

Question 11e : "As noted above, Google does not have the capacity to identify personal characteristics such as name, physical address or location, age, gender, or ethnicity based solely on an IP address.". Well that's crearly a lie, for sure, they can bind my IP to my gmail address (which is the default address proposed by Google : firstname.name@gmail...) , and using either my gmail information or my search logs they can clearly deduce all these sensitive information

Question 14 : "We plan to anonymize IP addresses that form part of our search logs by deleting the last octet". Many companies have at least a class C IP address. So even if they are anonymized, Google will ALWAYS be able to find out which queries have been issued by these companies.

Question 20 : "We have not completed the acquisition, and we are new to the third-party display ad serving business, so we have not yet decided" ... like Google could pay 3.1 b$ with no plan about what they are gonna do about critical points like merging the data.
I am not really conviced by the point "In fact, the data that DoubleClick collects via its cookies was not a factor in our decision to pursue the merger."(see 20.b)

Question 23 : "Google s support for the APEC privacy principles has been to help raise privacy protections". There are other points of view : http://www.out-law.com/page-8551.

from affiliatetip 561 days ago #

Votes: 0 | Vote:

+ -

I agree that some of this material could have been easily revealed by a congressional intern, but I think the point is that these are the Google definitions.

If the definition came from Wikipedia or some other source, it wouldn't necessarily be how Google defined a given term.

I'm guessing Barton wanted to avoid a moment where Google stated "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is."

from jaybong 560 days ago #

Votes: 0 | Vote:

+ -

"10. Please explain whether Google posts a link to its privacy policy on the home page or search results page of www.google.com and, if not, explain why not."

Ehhh...did they check www.google.com?

("Oh, do your research, Shutton!")

from sphinndr 559 days ago #

Votes: 0 | Vote:

+ -

I would have hated to be the intern who had to put that response together. Of course it must have gone through their legal department as well. Once again the powers that be are looking out for our best interests, well only if they coincide with their best interests.