Transparency, Google and Privacy

A group called One World Trust sent a survey to Google. A lot of people ask us to fill out surveys. I’m not sure who at Google they sent it to. In fairness, until yesterday, I had never heard of One World Trust, and it’s possible that whoever received it hadn’t either. Since we didn’t respond to their request for a survey, though, Google was ranked bottom in terms of transparency, in particular with regards to privacy. And Robert Lloyd, the report’s lead author, went so far as to say Google “did not co-operate (with the report) and on some policy issues, such as transparency towards customers, they have no publicly available information at all.” All this according to the FT http://us.ft.com/ftgateway/superpage.ft?news_id=fto120420070313216545.

But filling out surveys is not how a company proves transparency to its customers. It does so by making information public. We’ve gone to extraordinary lengths to publish information for our users about our privacy practices. In many respects, I feel we lead the industry. Here are just a few examples:

We were the first search company to start anonymising our search records (a move the rest of the industry soon followed), and we published our exchange of letters with the EU privacy regulators, explaining these issues in great depth. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/how-long-should-google-remember.html

We engineer transparency into our technologies like Web History, which allow users to see and control their own personal search history.
https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?hl=en&continue=http://www.google.com/psearch&nui=1&service=hist

We’ve also gone to extraordinary lengths to explain our privacy practices to users in the clearest ways we can devise.
Our privacy policies: http://www.google.com/privacy.html
Our privacy channel on YouTube, with consumer-focused videos explaining basic privacy concepts:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/google-search-privacy-plain-and-simple.htmlhttp://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/search-privacy-and-personalized-search.htmlOur Google blogs on privacy: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/05/why-does-google-remember-information.html
Our Google public policy blogs on privacy: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/

With each of these efforts, we were the first, and often the only, search engine to embrace this level of transparency and user control. And lots of people in Google are working on even more tools, videos and content to help our users understand our privacy practices and to make informed decisions about how to use them. Check back to these sites regularly to see more.

So, really, is it fair for this organization to claim that “on some policy issues, such as transparency towards customers, they have no publicly available information at all”? Perhaps next time, they can follow up their email with a comment on our public policy blog, or a video response on our Google Privacy YouTube channel. Or even send a question to our Privacy Help Site:
http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=privacy . Well, so much for the report’s claim that Google doesn’t have a feedback link.