Inside Google

The following Op-Ed commentary by Consumer Watchdog’s John M. Simpson was published in the Thursday, January 28th, 2010 edition of The San Francisco Chronicle:
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The Federal Trade Commission, in the midst of
studying how to protect consumers’ privacy online, needs to focus on
what business online companies are really in.

Where Google is concerned, for example, it’s all about the ads.

One question being discussed at today’s FTC Privacy Roundtable at UC
Berkeley is whether technology, for instance some new generation of
software, can be relied upon to protect consumers’ online privacy.

Consumers can’t look to technology for lasting privacy protection.
It’s often too complex and cumbersome to use effectively. Moreover,
when one technology is developed to protect consumers, another emerges
to trump it. Enforceable regulations that have real consequences when
violated are necessary. They should be based on broad principles, not
on specific technologies.

Murder is illegal. We don’t have one law against killing someone
with a gun and a different one against killing him with a knife.
Similarly, we don’t care what technology was used to spy on us; we just
want to be able to say no.

The FTC needs to focus first on what online companies do and what
broad regulations will be effective in letting consumers protect
personal information.

Take Google, the king of the Internet. We need to understand that,
despite its avowed mission "to organize the world’s information and
make it universally accessible and useful," Google is an advertising
business. It gathers huge amounts of consumer data and uses that
information to sell ads. According to a filing with the Securities and
Exchange Commission last November, 97 percent of Google’s revenue was
coming from advertising.

Google logs what you are searching for and tracks you as you surf
the Web. Compiling and analyzing this data to offer us up to
advertisers is Google’s $20 billion-a-year advertising gold mine.

The FTC’s job is make sure that consumers have control of what data
is gathered, how it is used and how long it’s kept. Consumers must
first be able to see what data Google and the other online companies
have accumulated, then delete it if they wish or prevent it from being
gathered in the first place.

Control is the key. Google could long ago have offered everyone a
simple "make me anonymous" button. But it’s not likely that Google or
any other company will voluntarily give us that control, because it
endangers their advertising profits.

The more realistic scenario is the government will need to step in
with a "do not track me" list, analogous to the national "do not call"
list. Only government can force Google and other tech giants to respect
our privacy. Relying on private technology fixes, which the smarter
engineers at Google can always disable, and consumers will have a hard
time understanding, is the least powerful approach. The FTC should keep
it simple; just let us tell the companies "no."

John M. Simpson is a consumer advocate with Consumer Watchdog. Reach him at [email protected].