Archive | View All

RSS feed for this section

News Clipping

“That’s kind of a fundamental human right,” argued John Simpson, an advocate with Consumer Watchdog. “The books that people have been taking out of the library are not something that’s shared, and librarians have fought to maintain that. Generally, you can’t go in and say, ‘What’s my wife been reading on her library card? What’s my son been reading on our library card?’ It’s private. In the same way, the Internet is a great source of information, and people ought to be able to consider that their activity online is private in the same way. The fact of the matter is that it’s not right now.”

Continue reading…

Press Release

SANTA MONICA, CA — The consumer group that recently launched a popular online animated satire of Google’s privacy problems embodied in an ice cream truck said the revelation that a Google engineer tracked children down shows that private information is never safe if it is in Google’s hands. Consumer Watchdog called on Google to publicly answer some basic questions about how effectively it protects consumers’ privacy.

Continue reading…

Blog Post

Google has fired an engineer for accessing the user accounts of four minors, according Gawker media. David Barksdale stalked and spied upon the teenagers while working as a Site Reliability Engineer at Google’s Kirkland, WA, office. Google told Tech Crunch this is the second time it has fired an engineer for privacy violations.

Continue reading…

Press Release

SANTA MONICA, CA – Consumer Watchdog today invited Google to participate in a conference, “Google, The Internet And The Future,” that the nonpartisan, nonprofit public interest group plans to host in Washington this fall as part of its Inside Google project. The invitation came in a letter to CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It was prompted by Google’s promotional campaign this week in Washington highlighting its privacy tools and a House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts and Competition hearing Thursday on competition in digital markets.

Continue reading…

News Clipping

On Thursday, Consumer Watchdog complained about the ad rejection in an open letter published on its site, and a Google representative confirmed Friday that Google had overturned the original decision but did not admit making any error. “As the trademark owner, upon becoming aware of their letter, we decided–regardless of whether these particular ads violate our policies or not–to authorize them to run,” a Google representative said.

Continue reading…

Blog Post

Google’s mission may be to open the world to information, but it is refusing to let our consumer group buy a search advertisement promoting wildly popular online animation that takes CEO Eric Schmidt to task over his statements about privacy issues. It seems the search giant cares a lot more about its own corporate privacy, than it does about its users’ privacy.

Continue reading…

Press Release

SANTA MONICA, CA — New comments by Google CEO Eric Schmidt in Berlin show the top executive of the Internet giant fails “to recognize that the direction Google is currently heading is inexorably at odds with the notion of personal privacy,” Consumer Watchdog said today. Schmidt said, among other things, “We can suggest what you should do next, what you care about. Imagine: we know where you are, we know what you like.”

Continue reading…

News Clipping

An anti-Google video is running on a billboard in Times Square, criticizing the search company on privacy issues. The 15-second cartoon depicts Chief Executive Eric Schmidt as an ice cream peddler with the text, “He’s collecting your personal information.” The nonprofit Consumer Watchdog, based in Santa Monica, Calif., is running the $25,000 campaign on a 560-square-foot CBS Jumbotron in Times Square. The video will air 36 times a day, in between promos for the TV show “CSI,” until Oct. 15.

Continue reading…

News Clipping

Made wary by the Google Wi-Fi scandal, privacy advocates are concerned. Part of the problem is that there’s so little public awareness of what’s going on, said John Simpson, an advocate with Consumer Watchdog, a group that’s been highly critical of Google in the past. “If I buy a cell phone, do I expect to be mapping people’s Wi-Fi locations for the company that sold me the phone?” he asked. “My answer to that is I’d kind of be taken aback. Part of the problem with this technology is that people just don’t know what’s going on,” he added.

Continue reading…