Inside Google

Google Instant is not for me. When I search, I don’t want Google to know where I am or what I like or to tell me things it thinks I am interested in. I don’t want a for-profit corporation to be what Sergey Brin wants Google to be – “the third half of your brain.”

“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.”

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.

Sometimes satire becomes more true than anyone ever could imagine happening. News this week shows our video touted in Times Square and viewed more than 330,000 times is right on the mark. CEO Eric Schmidt is driving the Google ice cream truck and an engineer in the back has been invading kids’ privacy.

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.

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.

Google has now decided to run ads from Consumer Watchdog critical of the Internet giant’s privacy practices and aimed to promote a satirical animated video of CEO Eric Schmidt. Thursday Consumer Watchdog President Jamie Court and I wrote Schmidt arguing that the company had a moral obligation to display advertising from critics.

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.

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.

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.”