Kevin Bankston, senior staff attorney at the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, is worried that Google might know more about its punters
than their own mums.
Google knows what you searched for as well as your
activity on partner Web sites that use its ad services. If you use the Chrome
browser, it may know every Web site you've typed into the address bar. It has
all your email, if you use Gmail, appointments, and in some cases might know
where you are sitting at the moment and what you are watching.
If you use
Google phone it could have a transcript of your phone conversation, not to
mention your latest snaps. Google's argument is that it does not really know
all that information it is just stored in its servers. But really it is asking
you to trust it not to use the data or hand it over to others.
Bankston told
Computerworld that Google is expecting consumers to trust it with the closest thing to a
printout of their brain that has ever existed. Other problem is that Google
has been too vague in explaining how it uses the data it collects, how it shares
information among its services and with its advertisers, how it protects that
data from litigators and government investigators, and how long it retains that
data before deleting or "anonymising" it so that it can't be tracked back to
individual users.