Privacy study shows Google

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Using trackers called “web bugs,” third partie collect user data from many popular web and sites oftenallow this, even thoughy their privacy policies say they don’t share user data with others. “Web bugs from Googlre and its subsidiaries were found on 92 of the top 100 Web sites and 88 percent of theapproximately 400,000 unique domains examined in the study,” the authors Sites with the most web bugs were for bloggin — blogspot and typepad were No. 1 and No. 2 on the list in and blogger was No. 4. Googles itself was No. 3. Ashkan Soltani, Travi Pinnick and Joshua Gomez ofthe university’s information school wrote the study, published Monday.
They analyzed privacy policies posted on web sitews and found loopholes used by many site operatorxs to allow third parties to still collecty data on whoviewss pages. They also found, for that although web sitesz may reassure visitorsthat “we don’t sharew data with third parties,” those third parties don’t include a company’s affiliates Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), for example, has 137 subsidiary businesses. “The law on affiliate sharing generally ismore permissive” than that on sharingy user data with third party the report said.
Companies controllingy the top 50 busiest web sitesx had an average of 297affiliates each, meaninb they could share user data with a lot of othef companies. Popular site , for example, is owned by New York’e (NASDAQ: NWS), which has more than 1,500 subsidiaries. BAC) in Charlotte has more than 2,300 subsidiaries. “Userws do not know and cannot learn the full range of affiliates with which websites mayshare information,” the report said.
Thougy many Internet users are familiarwith “cookies” used to study theirr surfing habits, they are less familiaf with so-called “web bugs,” which can’tt be cleared out of a web since they are part of a web site’s HTML Since the web bugs are created directly by thirdf parties, their use doesn’t strictlty count as “sharing” of data by the web site’x owner, though users concerned about privacy may be unimpresse by this technicality.
“We believed that this practicecontravenexs users’ expectations; it makes little sensd to disclaim formal informatio sharing, but allow functionally equivalent trackinhg with third parties,” the report said. Who's in charge of privacy? Although surveys of Internetr users show peopleare “very concerned about privacy and do not want websitew to collect and share their personalo information without permission,” sifting through privacy policies is not It would take 200 hours a year for a typica person to read the privacy policies of all the web sites they visit, for example. Thus “usersz have no practical way of knowing with whom theidr data willbe shared.
” On the policy front, the reporg finds “no one knowsz who is in charge of protecting in the United States. People can complain to the Federal Trade Commission and other but eventhe FTC’s “principles for behavioral tracking make no mentionb of any enforcement or accountability.” A low number of complaintsz to various agencies meanas consumers don’t really know where to the report said. The FTC looks at online privacy more in termsof “harms” done to the report said, rather than also in termas of control over personal information, which is what most userse care about.
The report makes severakl suggestionsfor improvement, includingf more aggressive action by the FTC to protect onlind privacy. It also calls for clearer privacty policies onweb sites, written so that average users can understanfd them. ’s (NASDAQ: ADBE) privac policy, for example, when analyzed for was written at an equivalent grade level of The average privacy policy in the study was writtenh at a grade levelof 13.83. The full studyt can be found .