There’s quite a bit of blogosphere babble and daytime-soap drama about Privacy International’s report putting Google at the bottom of its list and labeling the search giant ‘hostile to privacy’.

For those of you just tuning in, let’s review a bit of the chronology:

June 9: Privacy International releases its report on the privacy rankings of 23 Internet service companies, antagonistically titled ‘A Race to the Bottom’. The only company to receive the not-so-coveted black label, meaning ‘comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility to privacy’, is Google.

We are aware that the decision to place Google at the bottom of the ranking is likely to be controversial, but throughout our research we have found numerous deficiencies and hostilities in Google’s approach to privacy that go well beyond those of other organizations. While a number of companies share some of these negative elements, none comes close to achieving status as an endemic threat to privacy. This is in part due to the diversity and specificity of Google’s product range and the ability of the company to share extracted data between these tools, and in part it is due to Google’s market dominance and the sheer size of its user base. Google’s status in the ranking is also due to its aggressive use of invasive or potentially invasive technologies and techniques.

The view that Google “opens up” information through a range of attractive and advanced tools does not exempt the company from demonstrating responsible leadership in privacy. Google’s increasing ability to deep-drill into the minutiae of a user’s life and lifestyle choices must in our view be coupled with well defined and mature user controls and an equally mature privacy outlook. Neither of these elements has been demonstrated. Rather, we have witnessed an attitude to privacy within Google that at its most blatant is hostile, and at its most benign is ambivalent. These dynamics do not pervade other major players such as Microsoft or eBay, both of which have made notable improvements to the corporate ethos on privacy issues.

June 10: Simon Davies, the Director of Privacy International, posts an open letter to Google, accusing them of having accused PI of a conflict of interest.

Two European journalists have independently told us that Google representatives have contacted them with the claim that “Privacy International has a conflict of interest regarding Microsoft”. I presume this was motivated because Microsoft scored an overall better result than Google in the rankings.

…According to our sources, your representative or representatives made particular reference to one member of our 70-member international Advisory Board. This man is a current employee of Microsoft. I can confirm that he joined our Advisory Board well before he was headhunted by Microsoft. At the time he was the director of a leading UK non-governmental organization and had more than six years extensive involvement in the work of Privacy International. He is a decent, skilled and honorable man who upon his appointment with Microsoft offered us his resignation. We refused to accept it, and he continues to serve on the Board in a private capacity. As an exceptionally skilled IT and security expert he is a superb resource in our day-to-day work across many fields of privacy. To infer that he in any way influences our decisions with regard to Microsoft is not just inaccurate but it is also insulting.

June 10: Danny Sullivan writes a post entitled ‘Google Bad On Privacy? Maybe It’s Privacy International’s Report That Sucks’. The post details Danny’s objections to the lack of intellectual rigor displayed in the PI report. It’s pretty even-handed, though:

As for Google, the reality is it can expect much more of this type of treatment as it continues to monitor much of what we do… To save itself, I’d like to see Google appoint a privacy czar, someone charged with, as I’ve suggested above, assuming the worst about the company and diligently working to ensure users have as much protection as possible.

June 10: Slashdot catches the story and starts a typical Slashdot brou-ha-ha, including a tangential diversion into the theory that 9/11 was an inside job. As of now: 247 comments, mostly supporting Google.

June 11: Following a bit of back-and-forth in the comments on Danny’s article, Matt Cutts from Google posts ‘Why I Disagree With Privacy International’. As of now, he’s got 86 comments on the piece, mostly backing him. In his post is a comment on what I believe to be the single biggest danger of PI’s approach:

Personally, I think Privacy International should feel remorse about walking right past several other companies to single out Google for their lowest rating. But I think that there’s a larger danger here too. I believe this report could corrode earnest efforts to improve privacy at companies around the internet. Why? Because the bottom-line takeaway message that I got from the report is that a company can work hard on privacy issues and still get dragged into the mud. Consider: in the last year or so, other companies gave users’ queries to the government, leaked millions of raw user queries, or even sold user queries and still came off better than Google did.

Privacy International has decided that the best way to effect change is through aggressive antagonism. Perhaps this is because they didn’t get a satisfactory response from Google when they first attempted to contact them, or perhaps it’s just their style. Either way, the net result is not one of willing cooperation and collaboration towards a happy, more privacy-conscious society. The net result is a big old sides-taking right-vs-wrong debate between Privacy International supporters and Google supporters.

There’s a Buddhist saying: ‘Don’t look at my finger; look at the moon.’ Privacy International is the finger. What do you think is the moon?

This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 11:31 pm and is filed under Privacy, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.