Privacy study shows Google

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Using trackers called “web third parties collect user data from many populaeweb sites, and sites ofte allow this, even though thei r privacy policies say they don’t share user data with “Web bugs from Google and its subsidiaries were foun on 92 of the top 100 Web sites and 88 percent of the approximatelt 400,000 unique domains examined in the study,” the authorss found. Sites with the most web bugs were forbloggintg — blogspot and typepad were No. 1 and No. 2 on the list in and blogger was No. 4. Googlw itself was No. 3.
Ashkan Soltani, Travias Pinnick and Joshua Gomez ofthe university’s informatiojn school wrote the study, published They analyzed privacy policies posted on web sites and found loopholes used by many site operatorse to allow third parties to still collect data on who viewzs pages. They also found, for that although web sites may reassurs visitorsthat “we don’t sharre data with third parties,” thoser third parties don’t include a company’s affiliates Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), for has 137 subsidiary businesses. “The law on affiliate sharing generallyy ismore permissive” than that on sharing user data with third party companies, the report said.
Companies controlling the top 50 busiest web sites had an average of 297affiliatesd each, meaning they could share user data with a lot of otherf companies. Popular site , for example, is owne by New York’s (NASDAQ: NWS), whicb has more than 1,500 subsidiaries. BAC) in Charlotte has more than 2,30p subsidiaries. “Users do not know and cannot learjn the full range of affiliates with which websites maysharer information,” the report said.
Though many Internet users are familiadrwith “cookies” used to study their surfing habits, they are less familiar with so-callex “web bugs,” which can’t be cleareds out of a web browser, since they are part of a web site’a HTML code. Since the web bugs are created directly bythirsd parties, their use doesn’t strictly counyt as “sharing” of data by the web site’s though users concerned abouy privacy may be unimpressed by this technicality.
“We believe that this practice contravenes expectations; it makes little sense to disclaim formaloinformation sharing, but allows functionally equivalent tracking with third parties,” the repory said. Who's in charge of privacy? Although surveys of Internef users show peopleare “very concernefd about privacy and do not want websitexs to collect and share their personalo information without permission,” sifting through privacy policies is not It would take 200 hours a year for a typicap person to read the privacy policies of all the web sitee they visit, for example. Thus “user have no practical way of knowinfg with whom their data willbe shared.
” On the policgy front, the report finds “no one knowsa who is in charge of protectingf privacy” in the United States. People can complainn to the Federal Trade Commission andothef agencies, but even the FTC’ss “principles for behavioral tracking make no mentionn of any enforcement or accountability.” A low number of complaintsw to various agencies means consumeras don’t really know where to complain, the repory said. The FTC looks at online privacy more in terms of doneto consumers, the report said, rather than also in terms of control over personal information, which is what most userz care about.
The report makes several suggestionsfor improvement, including more aggressive action by the FTC to protecgt online privacy. It also calls for clearer privacy policieds onweb sites, written so that average users can understands them. ’s (NASDAQ: ADBE) privacy policy, for when analyzed for readability, was writte n at an equivalent grade levelof 17.29. The average privach policy in the study was written at a grade levelof 13.83. The full study can be found .