Google admits to flaws in maintaining consumer privacy to Senate committe
Also, water is wet.
By Greg Synek,
Through the looking glass: Acknowledging wrongdoing is Google's strategy
in facing the Senate for a round of hearings on consumer data privacy.
As Congress members throw around ideas of a US version of GDPR, Google
has little time to show its privacy invasions can be fixed through
self-monitoring.
In testimony to the Senate Commerce Committee, Google's chief privacy
officer Keith Enright shares that the company has made a series of
mistakes. Previous fines and lawsuits brought against Google make that
fact blatantly obvious.
In 2011, Google agreed to privacy audits over a 20 year span after being
accused of violating its own policies on the failed social network
Google Buzz. A year later, Google shelled out $22.5 million to the
Federal Trade Commission for misleading users of Safari into thinking
that tracking cookies were not being used for targeted ads.
More recently, Google has been caught trying to track smartphone users
even when location services have been turned off. The extensive means
that Google has gone through to track users might make you want to
actually read some of the lengthy policy pages that are frequently
skipped over by clicking "I agree", a fact that Google and other
companies frequently take advantage of.
Enright writes to the Senate, "We acknowledge that we have made mistakes
in the past, from which we have learned, and improved our robust
privacy program." Quite frankly, there is nothing in Google's policies
that is really privacy-enabling. It is still nearly impossible to avoid
Google's tracking without going through extensive means to avoid all
Google services.
Google emphasizes that personal information is never sold to outside
parties, but all that really does is force advertisers to use Google's
services instead of being able to run their own private ad campaigns.
Although advertisers cannot directly buy your information from Google,
they still have deep insights into personal interests and know what you
might want to buy and which services you might be likely to use.
Europe has brought about mass numbers of privacy policy changes through
the General Data Protection Regulation. Senate Commerce Committee
Chairman John Thune writes that Congress needs to work on making data
privacy protections law. Although the United States is not yet ready to
adopt a far reaching privacy resolution, there is growing support for
stricter regulations on consumer data.
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