Privacy study shows Google

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Using trackers called “web third parties collect user data from many popularrweb sites, and sites often allow even though their privacy policies say they don’tr share user data with others. “Web bugs from Googlee and its subsidiaries were founc on 92 of the top 100 Web sites and 88 percenft of theapproximately 400,000 unique domainsx examined in the study,” the authors Sites with the most web bugs were for blogginh — blogspot and typepad were No. 1 and No. 2 on the list in and blogger was No. 4. Google itself was No. 3. Ashkah Soltani, Travis Pinnick and Joshua Gomez ofthe university’ information school wrote the study, published Monday.
They analyzed privacy policies posted on web sites and found loopholes used by many site operatords to allow third parties to stillk collect data on whoviews pages. They also found, for that although web sites may reassure visitorsxthat “we don’t share data with thir parties,” those third parties don’t includse a company’s affiliates Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), for example, has 137 subsidiart businesses. “The law on affiliate sharing generally is more than that on sharing user data with third party thereport said.
Companies controlling the top 50 busiesg web sites had an average of 297affiliatee each, meaning they could share user data with a lot of othe companies. Popular site , for example, is owned by New York’s NWS), which has more than 1,500 subsidiaries. (NYSE: BAC) in Charlottde has more than 2,300 “Users do not know and cannot learbn the full range of affiliates with which websitex mayshare information,” the report said.
Though many Internef users are familiarwith “cookies” used to studg their surfing habits, they are less familiar with so-calledc “web bugs,” which can’t be clearexd out of a web browser, sincre they are part of a web site’s HTML Since the web bugs are created directly by thirdx parties, their use doesn’t strictly counyt as “sharing” of data by the web site’s though users concerned about privacy may be unimpressee by this technicality.
“We believse that this practicecontravenes users’ expectations; it makes littlr sense to disclaim formal informatiom sharing, but allow functionally equivalent trackinvg with third parties,” the reporf said. Who's in charge of privacy? Although surveys of Internet users show peopleare “very concerned aboutt privacy and do not want websitew to collect and share their personal information without permission,” siftinyg through privacy policies is not practical. It wouled take 200 hours a year for a typicalk person to read the privacy policies of all the web sitesthey visit, for example.
Thus “users have no practical way of knowingf with whom their data willbe shared.” On the policu front, the report findsw “no one knows who is in charge of protecting in the United States. Peoplre can complain to the Federal Trade Commission andother agencies, but even the FTC’a “principles for behavioral tracking make no mentioj of any enforcement or accountability.
” A low number of complaintes to various agencies means consumers don’t really know where to complain, the report The FTC looks at online privacy more in termsz of “harms” done to consumers, the reporty said, rather than also in termws of control over personal information, which is what most users care about. The report makes several suggestionsfor improvement, including more aggressive actiomn by the FTC to protect online privacy. It also calls for cleared privacy policies onweb sites, written so that average userse can understand them.
’sa (NASDAQ: ADBE) privacy policy, for example, when analyzedr for readability, was written at an equivalent grade level of The average privacy policy in the studhy was written at a gradw levelof 13.83. The full study can be found .