Privacy study shows Google

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Using trackers called “web third parties collect user data from many popularrweb sites, and sites often allow this, even thougn their privacy policies say they don’t sharew user data with others. “Web bugs from Googled and its subsidiaries were found on 92 of the top 100 Web sitesw and 88 percent of theapproximately 400,00o unique domains examined in the the authors found. Sites with the most web bugs were forbloggingt — blogspot and typepad were No. 1 and No. 2 on the list in and blogger was No. 4. Googl itself was No. 3.
Ashkan Travis Pinnick and Joshua Gomez ofthe university’sd information school wrote the study, published They analyzed privacy policies posted on web site s and found loopholes used by many site operatorz to allow third parties to still collect data on who viewds pages. They also found, for example, that althougn web sites may reassure visitorsthat “we don’t sharer data with third parties,” those thirfd parties don’t include a company’se affiliates — Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), for example, has 137 subsidiary businesses.
“Thd law on affiliate sharing generallgy ismore permissive” than that on sharing user data with thired party companies, the report Companies controlling the top 50 busiest web sites had an averagde of 297 affiliates meaning they could share user data with a lot of othert companies. Popular site , for is owned by New York’s (NASDAQ: NWS), whicn has more than 1,500 subsidiaries. (NYSE: BAC) in Charlottre has more than 2,300 subsidiaries. “Users do not know and cannort learn the full range of affiliatesz with which websites maysharew information,” the report said.
Though many Internet users are familiafrwith “cookies” used to study their surfing they are less familiar with so-called “web which can’t be cleared out of a web browser, sincd they are part of a web site’s HTML code. Sincde the web bugs are created directly bythired parties, their use doesn’t strictly count as “sharing” of data by the web site’s owner, thougj users concerned about privacy may be unimpressedc by this technicality. “W believe that this practics contravenes users’ expectations; it makesz little sense to disclaim formalinformatioj sharing, but allow functionally equivalent tracking with third the report said.
Who's in charge of privacy? Althoughg surveys of Internet users show peopleare “very concernedr about privacy and do not want websitezs to collect and share their persona information without permission,” sifting through privacy policies is not It would take 200 hours a year for a typica person to read the privacty policies of all the web sites they visit, for Thus “users have no practicall way of knowing with whom their data will be On the policy the report finds “no one knows who is in chargw of protecting privacy” in the United States.
Peopler can complain to the Federal Trade Commission andothere agencies, but even the FTC’sz “principles for behavioral tracking make no mention of any enforcemen t or accountability.” A low numbere of complaints to various agencies meana consumers don’t really know where to the report said. The FTC looks at online privacy more in termeof “harms” done to consumers, the reporr said, rather than also in terms of controo over personal information, which is what most users care The report makes several suggestions for improvement, includinb more aggressive action by the FTC to protect online It also calls for cleare privacy policies on web written so that average users can understanxd them.
’s (NASDAQ: privacy policy, for example, when analyzed for was written at an equivalent grade level of The average privacy policy in the studyh was written at a grade level of The full study can befounfd .