Google will be subjected to independent privacy audits for the next 20 years over charges that it “violated its own privacy promises”. The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said that the search giant wrongly used information from Google Mail users last year to create its social network Buzz. The FTC ruled that “the options for declining or leaving the social network were ineffective”. “Google Buzz fell short of our usual standards,” Google said in a blog post. “While we worked quickly to make improvements, regulators unsurprisingly wanted more detail about what went wrong and how we could prevent it from happening again. “Today, we’ve reached an agreement with the FTC to address their concerns.” That agreement will require Google to undergo a privacy review once every two years for the next 20 years.
I created yahoo answers account once, locked down my profile as much as I could. It didn’t have the same name/avatar as my yahoo mail account, but they were associated.
Turns out every question I asked or answered was visible to my yahoo mail contacts (ie. RL people, friends, relatives, professional contacts etc.) without my knowledge.
It wasn’t until I emailed myself something and saw a list of updates for “see what this user has been up to” on the confirmation page that I had any idea. In the updated feed, they replaced my username/avatar with my email username/avatar.
It was a huge breach of my privacy and I have seen nobody else online mention it I suppose because nobody uses/cares about Yahoo any more? It doesn’t make it any more right.
Edited 2011-03-31 07:02 UTC
This is the type of service you get these days – it’s all about the money, by selling / showing your info at the proper places, obscured EULAs, even my lawyer cannot understand it, fortunately there are some commissions to work on that. The moral is: don’t show too much interesting stuff on the net, as you may end up being disappointed, even if the provider had good intentions, still, errors can happen.
So, as EULAs are contracts, you show them to your lawyer.
To avoid weird problems in the future that’s a good move 🙂
Edited 2011-03-31 22:32 UTC
Excellent. Google made a mistake, this way it isn’t likely to happen again. I think this solution is better for everybody, including Google itself.
The FTC should do this more often though, not just with corporations like Google that are cooperative and open about their mistakes.