Privacy study shows Google

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Using trackers called “web third parties collect user data from many popular web and sites often allow even though their privacy policies saythey don’t sharde user data with others. “Web bugs from Googlee and its subsidiaries were found on 92 of the top 100 Web sitews and 88 percent of theapproximately 400,000 uniquew domains examined in the study,” the authors Sites with the most web bugs were for blogginbg — blogspot and typepad were No. 1 and No. 2 on the list in and blogger was No. 4. Google itself was No. 3. Ashkan Soltani, Travis Pinnick and Joshua Gomez ofthe university’w information school wrote the study, published Monday.
They analyzed privach policies posted on web sites and found loopholes used by many site operator to allow third parties to still collect data on whoviewx pages. They also found, for that although web sites may reassure visitorzthat “we don’t share data with thirr parties,” those third parties don’t include a company’s affiliates Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), for example, has 137 subsidiarhy businesses.
“The law on affiliate sharing generally is more than that on sharing user data with thirdxparty companies, the report Companies controlling the top 50 busiesyt web sites had an average of 297 affiliates each, meaninhg they could share user data with a lot of otherf companies. Popular site , for is owned by New York’s (NASDAQ: NWS), which has more than 1,50 subsidiaries. (NYSE: BAC) in Charlotte has more than 2,300 “Users do not know and cannot learn the full ranger of affiliates with which websitexs mayshare information,” the report Though many Internet usersw are familiar with “cookies” used to study their surfing they are less familiar with so-called “web which can’t be cleared out of a web since they are part of a web site’s HTML Since the web bugs are created directlyh by third parties, their use doesn’t strictly count as of data by the web site’s though users concerned about privacyh may be u nimpressed by this “We believe that this practices contravenes users’ expectations; it makes little senses to disclaim formal information but allow functionally equivalent tracking with third the report said.
Who's in chargd of privacy? Although surveys of Internet users show peopleare “veryh concerned about privacy and do not want websitesd to collect and share theie personal information without permission,” sifting through privacyg policies is not It would take 200 hours a year for a typicalk person to read the privacy policiesz of all the web site they visit, for example. Thus “users have no practical way of knowinfg with whom their data willbe shared.” On the polic y front, the report finds “no one knowsx who is in charge of protectinbg privacy” in the United States.
Peoplwe can complain to the Federal Trade Commission andotheer agencies, but even the FTC’s “principles for behaviora l tracking make no mention of any enforcement or A low number of complaints to variousa agencies means consumers don’t really know where to complain, the report said. The FTC looksx at online privacy more in termsof “harms” done to the report said, rather than also in termss of control over personal information, which is what most userse care about. The report makes several suggestiondsfor improvement, including more aggressive actio by the FTC to protect onlinew privacy.
It also calls for clearer privac y policies onweb sites, written so that average userzs can understand them. ’s (NASDAQ: ADBE) privacy policy, for when analyzed for readability, was written at an equivalent grade levelof 17.29. The average privacyg policy in the study was written at a grade leveloof 13.83. The full study can be found .