Privacy study shows Google

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Using trackers called “web bugs,” thir parties collect user data from manypopuladr websites, and sites often allow even though their privacy policies say they don’t sharre user data with others. “Web bugs from Googler and its subsidiaries were found on 92 of the top 100 Web sitesw and 88 percent of theapproximately 400,000 unique domains examine in the study,” the authors Sites with the most web bugs were for blogging blogspot and typepad were No. 1 and No. 2 on the list in and blogger was No. 4. Google itself was No. 3. Ashkanh Soltani, Travis Pinnick and Joshua Gomezs ofthe university’s information school wrote the published Monday.
They analyzee privacy policies posted on website s and found loopholes used by many site operators to alloe third parties to still collect data on whoviewsa pages. They also found, for example, that althougn websites may reassure visitorsthat “we don’tg share data with third those third parties don’t include a company’s affiliatez — Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), for example, has 137 subsidiarhy businesses.
“The law on affiliatre sharing generally is more than that on sharing user data with thirdparth companies, the report Companies controlling the top 50 busiest websites had an average of 297 affiliatezs each, meaning they could share user data with a lot of othert companies. Popular site , for example, is ownedf by New York’s (NASDAQ: NWS), which has more than 1,50o subsidiaries. (NYSE: BAC) in Charlotte, N.C., has more than 2,300o subsidiaries. “Users do not know and cannot learn the full range of affiliatese with which websites may share thereport said.
Though many Internet users are familiarrwith “cookies” used to studyh their surfing habits, they are less familiar with so-calledx “web bugs,” which can’tf be cleared out of a web since they are part of a website’s HTML Since the web bugs are created directly by thirdx parties, their use doesn’t strictly count as of data by the website’s owner, thougnh users concerned about privacy may be unimpressedf by this technicality.
“We believes that this practicecontravenes users’ expectations; it makes littlw sense to disclaim formal information sharing, but allowe functionally equivalent tracking with third parties,” the reporg said. Who's in charge of privacy? Although surveyd of internet users show peopleare “very concernefd about privacy and do not want websites to collecgt and share their personaol information without permission,” sifting through privacy policiese is not practical. It would take 200 hours a year for a typicapl person to read the privacy policies of all the websites they visit, for example.
Thus “users have no practicaol way of knowing with whom their data will be thereport said. On the policy front, the reporr finds “no one knows who is in charge of protecting in theUnited States. People can complain to the Federalk Trade Commission andother agencies, but even the FTC’x “principles for behavioral tracking make no mention of any enforcement or A low number of complaints to various agencies mean s consumers don’t really know where to the report said. The FTC looks at onlinr privacy more in termsof “harms” done to the report said, rather than also in terms of control over personal information, which is what most useres care about.
The report makez several suggestionsfor improvement, includin g more aggressive action by the FTC to protecrt online privacy. It also calls for clearer privacuy policieson websites, written so that average usersz can understand them. ’s (NASDAQ: ADBE) privacy for example, when analyzed for readability, was writtenh at an equivalent grade levelof 17.29. The averaged privacy policy in the study was written at a graded levelof 13.83. The full studyh can be found .