masterwordsmith-unplugged

The following article 10 things Google won’t tell you by Quentin Fottrell published in Market Watch is ten pages long but I daresay it should be compulsory reading for anyone who surfs the internet and/or uses an android phone.

Excerpt from the article:

When it comes to mobile devices, maps and retail, the know-it-all of the Internet suddenly doesn’t have all the answers.

1. “We know what you did last summer.”

Google, the giant search-engine company, has looked unusually vulnerable lately: It rattled financial markets on Thursday when it announced a 20% drop in third-quarter profits — and it accidentally released the results prematurely, to boot.

Yet despite the flap, Google.com’s dominance in search is unrivaled. And it owes that dominance not only to the way it dispenses information to consumers, but also to the surprising amount of data it collects from them.

Just this month, Google’s so-called unified privacy policy, which took effect in March as a replacement for separate policies for search, email, maps and YouTube, came under serious scrutiny. European Union regulators, lead by France’s National Commission on Computing and Freedom, voiced concerns that the policy is not clear enough in explaining to users how data is used and collected, that it’s too difficult for users to opt out of data collection, and that Google doesn’t say how long it holds on to data — including anything from a person’s location to a search term or a credit-card number. The European regulators threatened possible future fines or legal action. Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsel, says the company is confident that its privacy policies respect European law.

Google privacy rules have come under scrutiny in the U.S. too. In August, the Federal Trade Commission fined Google $22.5 million to settle charges that the company had bypassed privacy settings in Apple’s Safari browser on mobile and desktop devices in order to track users with “cookies” — little pieces of code — and target them with advertising. Google did not admit that any law had been violated and it removed the cookies from Apple’s browsers. A spokesman says it aggregates data and doesn’t sell it to third parties.

But the beef privacy experts have with Google extends to the real world as well: In the race to improve mapping technology, Google has been developing a 3-D feature that uses small planes to photograph major cities. Indeed, Google plans to cover metropolitan areas populated by 300 million people in multiple countries, by the end of the year. Trouble is, those individuals aren’t being consulted — and may not want high resolution pictures of their homes on the Internet. Nick Pickles, director of U.K.-based civil-liberties group Big Brother Watch, for one, says he thinks Google should ask permission before using pictures of people’s homes in its mapping systems, even though it isn’t required to by law. “This 3-D surveillance takes the cameras over the garden fence,” he says.

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