(Originally published May 8, 2019)
Yesterday evening, Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote an op-ed in the New York Times re-affirming Google’s commitment to privacy. Personally, I’d like to see Google go a little farther in their commitment to privacy, but this is a good start. Here are a few observations:
- There is a thinly-veiled shot at Apple. ‘Privacy Should Not Be a Luxury Good’ probably refers to Apple’s loud stance in favor of online privacy, including it’s ITP 2.0 policy of deleting third party cookies on the Safari browser. Google’s changes to cookie storage its Chrome browser were announced earlier this week. They don’t go nearly as far as privacy changes made either to Safari or to Firefox. It seems that Google is trying to position this smaller change as being in interests of a democratic internet.
- Pichai notes “a small subset of data helps serve ads that are relevant and that provide the revenue that keeps Google products free and accessible.’’ Whereas ‘small’ is relative at a company that has so many trilobites of data, this seems disingenuous. It’s enough for Google to own the largest individual share of a roughly 130 billion dollar market. There is a huge amount of data being recorded about internet users for use in online advertising. Where as privacy issues in online advertising may not be the most concerning, compared with voice and facial recognition data gone amok, financial institutions being hacked etc., etc. it is certainly the most prolific version of online surveillance in most of our lives.
- Pichai says “Google will never sell any personal information to third parties; and that you get to decide how your information is used.” I believe he means this as narrowly defined ‘Personally Identifiable Information’ (PII), as there is a substantial trade in aggregated behavioral data that Google participates in, primarily for use in advertising. According to their definitions:
”Google interprets PII as information that could be used on its own to directly identify, contact, or precisely locate an individual. This includes:
email addresses
mailing addresses
phone numbers
precise locations (such as GPS coordinates — but see the note below)
full names or usernames”
It’s also important to note what this doesn’t include:
“Google interprets PII to exclude, for example:
pseudonymous cookie IDs
pseudonymous advertising IDs
IP addresses
other pseudonymous end user identifiers”
I would also note that while ‘never’ is a strong word, definitions of ‘personal information’ can change, so don’t be so sure that ‘never’ means never and that you know what he means by ‘personal information’.
4. Pichai voices his support for more privacy regulation: “We think the United States would benefit from adopting its own comprehensive privacy legislation and have urged Congress to pass a federal law.” I do think he is being genuine. I also think he wants a strong hand in the writing of such legislation. I think that large tech companies are coming to feel the weight of so much user data as a large moral burden, and that they often feel they are forced to compromise their principles by fierce competition from the other tech giants as I said in another post. It will be better for Pichai, Zuckerberg, Cook, Bezos and all of their employees to have clear rules set by world governments to lay out the rules of the game so they don’t have to compromise on moral principles or the experience of their users.
5. I should say that having been an employee at Google, I find Pichai extremely likable and clearly well intentioned. It’s hard to be too cynical about anything he says. However, I think sometimes good intentions have bad consequences so a close reading of these announcements is in everyone’s interest.
It’s encouraging to see Google and Facebook make changes in favor of online privacy in the past couple weeks. It remains to be seen whether these changes are part of an ongoing commitment or if they are simply doing as little as they can get away with to stay the recent public outcry and fines from the EU and FTC.
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