Google’s Privacy Woes
As the Web’s dominant search company, Google knows what most of us search for and what we’re clicking on. So privacy questions about the company are inevitable – and they were plentiful this year. From the flubbed launch of Google Buzz (many users objected to the integration with Gmail) to the roaming Google Street View vehicles snapping photos of people without their consent, Google was hassled and harangued by users – and multiple countries – about privacy issues this year.
Even Google’s popular mobile OS, Android, attracted criticism. A study by university researchers found that some Android applications were transmitting private data to advertisers – often without users’ knowledge. Google’s response was that it was not an Android-specific issue, but one that affects all software.
The Dangers of Location Apps
Foursquare, Gowalla and similar apps took the tech world by storm this year. From a privacy point of view, it’s ultimately up to users to take precautions when they are ‘checking in’ to locations. Sites such as the short-lived PleaseRobMe.com (which, as the name suggests, highlighted when people were away from their homes) showcased the dangers of publishing your location data to the Web.
These concerns also extended to services that allow geo-tagged content, notably Twitter. In August we reported on a site called I Can Stalk U, which alerted us to the dangers of geo-tagged photos shared from your smartphone to social networks like Twitter.
eReaders & Privacy
As we wrote earlier this month, eReaders have been one of the biggest trends of 2010. The EFF recently released a guide to the privacy policies of eBook providers, from Amazon Kindle to Google Books to the Internet Archive.
You may not realize that both Amazon and Google log the books you buy or download, plus the pages viewed. There are benefits to this, for example Amazon can give you better eBook recommendations based on the data it tracks about what you’ve previously consumed. But this highlights a continuing theme of the privacy debate: to get better recommendations, you have to give up some of your privacy. Expect this to become a more prominent concern next year, as personalization and recommendations become key features of mobile shopping apps.
Privacy Controls in Browsers
Web browsers are a very competitive market, with Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google’s Chrome, Opera and others all scrambling to provide better features than the others. Privacy controls are now one of those key features in a modern web browser. Microsoft’s latest browser version is Internet Explorer 9, which recently got “tracking protection” for better browsing privacy. The tracking protection will be an opt-in feature for users to identify and block certain forms of website tracking.
Conclusion
As you can see, it’s been a very busy year on the privacy front. As certain companies gain more power (Facebook, Google), the Web community at large becomes more concerned about what they do with all of our personal data. As for WikiLeaks, it’s too early to tell what the ultimate outcome will be. But at the very least, WikiLeaks has shaken up the notion of privacy in government communications.
Let us know in the comments what privacy issue has gotten you worked up this year.
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