Sacramento Business Journal: Privacy study shows Google’s eyes are everywhere
The Sacramento Business Journal reports on a privacy study from the University of California Berkeley.
A University of California Berkeley report shows that most Internet users don’t understand Web site privacy policies, and that major online businesses such as Google Inc. freely gather data and share it with affiliated businesses via loopholes in those policies.
Using trackers called “web bugs,” third parties collect user data from many popular Web sites, and sites often allow this, even though their privacy policies say they don’t share user data with others.
“Web bugs from Google and its subsidiaries were found on 92 of the top 100 Web sites and 88 percent of the approximately 400,000 unique domains examined in the study,” the authors found.
Sites with the most web bugs were for blogging — blogspot and typepad were No. 1 and No. 2 on the list in March, and blogger was No. 4. Google itself was No. 3.
Ashkan Soltani, Travis Pinnick and Joshua Gomez of the university’s information school wrote the study, published Monday. [...]
On the policy front, the report finds “no one knows who is in charge of protecting privacy” in the United States. People can complain to the Federal Trade Commission and other agencies, but even the FTC’s “principles for behavioral tracking make no mention of any enforcement or accountability.” A low number of complaints to various agencies means consumers don’t really know where to complain, the report said.
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