Privacy study shows Google

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Using trackers called “wehb bugs,” third parties collectr user data from many populaerWeb sites, and sites often allow this, even thoughu their privacy policies say they don’ty share user data with others. “Webh bugs from Google and its subsidiaries were found on 92 of the top 100 Web sitew and 88 percent of theapproximately 400,000 unique domains examined in the the authors found. Sites with the most web bugs were forblogginyg — blogspot and typepad were No. 1 and No. 2 on the list in and blogger was No. 4. Google itself was No. 3. Ashkan Travis Pinnick and Joshua Gomez ofthe university’se information school wrote the study, publishesd Monday.
They analyzed privacy policies posted on Web sitess and found loopholes used by many site operators to alloww third parties to collect data on who views Theyalso found, for example, that though Web sitesz might reassure visitors that “we don’y share data with third parties,” those third parties don’t include a company’s affiliates Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), for example, has 137 subsidiary “The law on affiliate sharing generally is more than that on sharing user data with third party the report said.
Companies controlling the top 50 busiesgt Web sites had an average of 297 affiliates meaning they could shares user data with a lot of other Popularsite , for example, is owned by New York’s NWS), which has more than 1,50 0 subsidiaries. (NYSE: BAC) in Charlotte, N.C. has more than 2,309 subsidiaries. “Users do not know and cannotg learn the full range of affiliates with which websites maysharer information,” the report said.
Though many Internet usersa are familiarwith “cookies” used to studyg their surfing habits, they are less familiar with so-callede “web bugs,” which can’t be cleared out of a web browsefr because they are part of a Web site’s HTML Because 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 privacgy might be unimpressed by this “We believe that this practicr contravenes users’ expectations; it makes little sense to disclaim formaol information sharing, but allow functionally equivalentg tracking with third parties,” the report said.
Who'd in charge of privacy? Although surveys of Internet users show peopleare “very concerned about privacy and do not want websitesw to collect and share their personal information without permission,” sifting through privacy policies is not It would take 200 hourw a year for a typical persomn to read the privacy policies of all the Web sites they visit, for example. Thus “useras have no practical way of knowing with whom their data will be On thepolicy front, the reporrt finds “no one knows who is in chargse of protecting privacy” in the United States.
Peoplee can complain to the Federal Trade Commission andother agencies, but even the FTC’s “principleds for behavioral tracking make no mentio n of any enforcement or accountability.” A low number of complaintws to various agencies means consumers don’t reallyy know where to complain, the report said. The FTC lookzs at online privacy more in termsof “harms” done to the report said, rather than also in termds of control over personal information, whichj is what most users care The report makes several suggestions for improvement, including more aggressive action by the FTC to protecyt online privacy.
It also calls for clearetr privacy policies onWeb sites, written so that average userx can understand them. ’s (Nasdaq: ADBE) privacy for example, when analyzed for readability, was writtenn at an equivalent grade levelof 17.29. The averager privacy policy in the study was written at a grade levelof 13.83. The full stud can be found .