Much of Google's resistance to adding a link to its privacy policy on its homepage seems to boil down to little more than aesthetics. As Steve Langdon, a Google spokesman, puts it: "We do believe that having very limited text…
Read More Disrupting Google’s homepage with a 14-charater string
As we know, Google refuses to place a link to its privacy policy on either its homepage or search results pages. It has been pointed out (thanks, Chris) that the California Online Privacy Protection Act of 2003 requires the operator…
Prompted by Google's resistance to cluttering its homepage with a link to its privacy policy, I decided to take a quick tour of the major search engines to compare the relative visibility of their privacy policies. AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo!…
I've long complained about how it takes at least 2 clicks to get to Google's privacy policy from its homepage (3 clicks if you count its new Privacy Center splash page). And that's only if you happen to click on…
Read More Google Wants You to Search for their Privacy Policy (and they get to record that query!)
Yahoo has issued a press release on their new ad sales system, AMP! that provided a few new insights into this "powerful new online advertising platform." The New York Times broke this story earlier, which I blogged about here. Interestingly,…
The European Commission's Article 29 Data Protection Working Party has released their long-awaited "Opinion on Data Protection Issues Related to Search Engines" (PDF), something I've debated here. At first glance, it seems we're in agreement that the Data Protection Directive…
Read More Article 29 Working Party: Opinion on Data Protection Issues Related to Search Engines
On the heels of growing public awareness of how "large Web companies are learning more about people than ever from what they search for and do on the Internet, gathering clues about the tastes and preferences of a typical user…
Read More Proposed NY Law to Limit the Web Tracking also Requires Access to Data Collected
When Ask.com launched AskEraser, a new service which promises to protect user privacy by, upon request, deleting users’ search activity from Ask.com servers, I applauded the effort, but also pointed out some of its shortcomings. The privacy advocacy group EPIC,…
As previously discussed, Ask.com has launched AskEraser, a new service which promises to protect user privacy by, upon request, deleting users' search activity from Ask.com servers. Ask has put together quite an extensive help page explaining the details of AskEraser,…
I've been incredibly busy lately, and need to quickly catch up on some recent items of note: Siva Vaidhyanathan has launched a new blog for his forthcoming book, "The Googlization of Everything"... ...while Cory Doctorow provides his fictional vision of…
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