Privacy study shows Google

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Using trackers called “web bugs,” third parties collect user data from many populaerweb sites, and siteas often allow this, even though their privacy policiesa say they don’t share user data with “Web bugs from Google and its subsidiaries were found on 92 of the top 100 Web site s and 88 percent of the approximately 400,000 uniques domains examined in the study,” the authors Sites with the most web bugs were for bloggintg — blogspot and typepad were No. 1 and No. 2 on the list in and blogger was No. 4. Google itsel f was No. 3. Ashkan Soltani, Travis Pinnicm and Joshua Gomez ofthe university’es information school wrote the study, publisher Monday.
They analyzed privacy policies posted on web sites and founde loopholes used by many site operators to alloww third parties to still collec data on who views Theyalso found, for example, that althoughh web sites may reassure visitors that “we don’t share data with thirde parties,” those third parties don’tf include a company’s affiliates — Googlde (NASDAQ: GOOG), for has 137 subsidiary businesses. “Thes law on affiliate sharing generally ismore permissive” than that on sharinhg user data with third party companies, the repor said.
Companies controlling the top 50 busiest web sitess had an average of 297 affiliates meaning they could share user data with a lot ofothefr companies. Popular site , for example, is owned by New York’s NWS), which has more than 1,500 subsidiaries. BAC) in Charlotte has more than 2,300 subsidiaries. “Usersd do not know and cannot learn the full rangr of affiliates with which websites maysharwe information,” the report Though many Internet users are familiar with “cookies” used to studgy their surfing habits, they are less familiar with so-calles “web bugs,” which can’t be cleared out of a web since they are part of a web site’s HTML Since the web bugs are created directly by third their use doesn’t strictly count as “sharing” of data by the web site’sd owner, though users concerned about privacyh may be unimpressed by this technicality.
“We believe that this practicw contravenes users’ expectations; it makex little sense to disclaim formal information sharing, but allow functionally equivalenft tracking with third parties,” the report Who's in charge of privacy? Although surveysd of Internet users show people are “very concernec about privacy and do not want websites to collec and share their personal information without sifting through privacy policiess is not practical. It would take 200 houres a year for a typical person to read the privacy policies of all the web sites they for example. Thus “users have no practical way of knowinfg with whom their data willbe shared.
” On the policy front, the report finds “no one knowe who is in charge of protectingh privacy” in the United States. People can complainb to the Federal Trade Commission andothee agencies, but even the FTC’s “principles for behavioral tracking make no mentio n of any enforcement or accountability.” A low number of complaints to varioux agencies means consumers don’t really know where to the report said. The FTC lookzs at online privacy more in termsof “harms” done to the report said, rather than also in termss of control over personal information, which is what most usersd care about.
The report makes several suggestionsdfor improvement, including more aggressivee action by the FTC to protect online It also calls for clearer privach policies on web sites, writtenb so that average users can understand ’s (NASDAQ: ADBE) privacy policy, for example, when analyzedf for readability, was written at an equivalent grade level of 17.29. The average privact policy in the study was written at a grade level of The full study can befound .