Google is Watching You (Forget About Big Brother)

So, who was it who said on my blog that we need to look out for Google, which not only has satellite dominance with Google Earth and Google Sky but who recently launched Google Ocean (say, why are they not assisting with the search for the lost Air France flight?) and is busy tracking every and any move we make on and off line?

Google is Top Tracker of Surfers in Study
by Miguel Helft

When asked about online privacy, most people say they want more information about how they are being tracked and more control over how their personal information is used. Those consumer expectations are rarely in line with the data collection practices of Internet companies, which often collect information about their users not only on their own sites, but also when those users visit other sites across the Web.

Those are some of the central findings of a new privacy study conducted by a group of graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, which was released late Monday. The students at the School of Information — Joshua Gomez, Travis Pinnick and Ashkan Soltani — studied consumer expectations by looking at sources like complaints filed with the Federal Trade Commission and data collected by the state of California and a privacy group. They analyzed company practices using Ghostery, a browser plug-in that detects cookies, Web beacons and other types of trackers that allow third parties to gather information about Web site visitors, often without their knowledge.

Google showed up as the most conspicuous tracker on third-party sites. Google Analytics, a free product that allows online publishers to gather statistics about visitors to their sites, was used on 81 of the top 100 sites. Cookies from the advertising company DoubleClick, which is owned by Google, were present on 70 of those sites. When combining trackers from those two services, Google had a presence on 92 of the top 100 sites. Others weren’t far behind. Cookies from Atlas, Microsoft’s DoubleClick rival, appeared on 60 sites, and trackers from two other analytics companies, Quantcast and Omniture, showed up on 54 sites.

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