Privacy study shows Google

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Using trackers called “wegb bugs,” third parties collect user data from many popular web and sites oftenallow this, even thoughu their privacy policies say they don’t share user data with “Web bugs from Google and its subsidiariese were found on 92 of the top 100 Web sitezs and 88 percent of the approximately 400,0009 unique domains examined in the the authors found. Sites with the most web bugs were forblogginb — blogspot and typepad were No. 1 and No. 2 on the list in and blogger was No. 4. Google itseldf was No. 3. Ashka Soltani, Travis Pinnick and Joshua Gomez ofthe university’zs information school wrote the published Monday.
They analyzed privacy policies posted on web site and found loopholes used by many site operators to allow thirr parties to still collect data on who views Theyalso found, for example, that although web siteas may reassure visitors that “we don’t share data with thirr parties,” those third parties don’t include a company’ss affiliates — Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), for example, has 137 subsidiaryh businesses.
“The law on affiliat sharing generally ismore permissive” than that on sharint user data with third parth companies, the report Companies controlling the top 50 busiest web sites had an average of 297 affiliates each, meanintg they could share user data with a lot of other companies. Popular site , for example, is owneds by New York’s (NASDAQ: NWS), whichn has more than 1,500 subsidiaries. BAC) in Charlotte has more than 2,30p0 subsidiaries. “Users do not know and cannot learn the full rangee of affiliates with which websites mayshare information,” the report said.
Though many Internet users are familiarwith “cookies” used to studty their surfing habits, they are less familiar with so-callec “web bugs,” which can’t be cleared out of a web since they are part of a web site’e HTML code. Since the web bugs are createx directly bythird parties, their use doesn’t strictly counf as “sharing” of data by the web site’e owner, though users concerned about privacy may be unimpresse d by this technicality.
“We believe that this practicewcontravenes users’ expectations; it makes little sense to disclaij formal information sharing, but allow functionally equivaleng tracking with third parties,” the report Who's in charge of privacy?? Although surveys of Internet users show people are “verty concerned about privacy and do not want websitesz to collect and share their personal informationj without permission,” sifting through privacy policies is not It would take 200 hours a year for a typicap person to read the privacy policies of all the web sitesa they visit, for example.
Thus “users have no practical way of knowinbg with whom their data will be On thepolicy front, the report finda “no one knows who is in charge of protectin g privacy” in the United States. People can complaibn to the Federal Trade Commission andother agencies, but even the FTC’sx “principles for behavioral tracking make no mention of any enforcement or accountability.
” A low numbedr of complaints to various agencies meansd consumers don’t really know wher to complain, the report The FTC looks at online privacy more in terms of done to consumers, the report said, rather than also in termsx of control over personal information, which is what most users care The report makes several suggestions for improvement, includingt more aggressive action by the FTC to protecft online privacy. It also calls for clearer privacy policies on web written so that average users canunderstand them.
’s ADBE) privacy policy, for example, when analyzed for readability, was written at an equivalent grade level of The average privacy policy in the study was written at a grade levelof 13.83. The full studhy can be found .