‘Opt out’ should be as easy to find as saying ‘Google it’
Last month, when a Frenchman sued Google over a satellite photo of him urinating in his front yard, his ire captured the feelings many Internet users have about privacy: They know they could be more zipped up than they are, but they still want to complain about feeling violated.
The Frenchman’s case was dismissed on a technicality, but many Internet users are still galled about the ease with which the computer programs at Google, Facebook and other companies pull together information about users’ contacts, whereabouts and shopping habits.
Log onto Facebook, and up pop people from your contacts list. Go onto a website for some national retailer, and up pops an ad related not only to your neighborhood but also to some topic you recently searched online. On one level, that’s a convenience and the byproduct of personal choices. On another, it’s an intrusion in which choice is just an illusion.
When Google made that sort of targeting and aggregation of information even easier for itself with a new privacy policy last month, there was an outcry of opposition.
Google says it’s not collecting any new or additional information about users, nor is it selling personal individual data. Instead, Google cashes in by bundling data from multiple users. “We obviously generate revenue from advertising, and (user) information is at the core of that,” a Google spokesman says, adding the company doesn’t then “tell the advertiser about a specific person and hand over the person’s information.”
Even so, there’s something creepy about such extensive tracking of personal information. Google (and Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft and others, including USA TODAY) track users with the help of “cookies” and other bits of code that follow where users go and what they do. The companies use the tracking information to attract lucrative, highly targeted advertising.
Put another way, tracking users is what helps make Google rich. Users benefit greatly from amazing search-engine technology, but they are owed some respect in exchange for their personal information. At a minimum, Google and other Internet companies should make it easy for users to opt out of sharing information if they want to.
’Net users deserve more respect
Yet opting out isn’t easy: Fewer than 4 in 10 users know they can reset their privacy settings more tightly, one poll shows. A study by Carnegie Mellon University shows that even with careful effort, users can’t set up “do not track” provisions to ward off nosy advertisers. USA TODAY’S own efforts with Google show it takes about 10 clicks, plus two processes of scrolling down to the bottom of the computer screen, to opt out of targeted ads.
As for preventing one’s computer from collecting a search history that Google can use, that takes several clicks as well. This could have drawbacks. Users who want to take advantage of security features such as Safesearch, which is meant to keep out images and information inappropriate for children, need the cookies that would be disabled to keep the users’ search history private. What’s more, Google stands accused of not respecting privacy settings that users do set up, specifically those of Apple users who access Google over their Safari browsers.
A Google spokesman says the company works to make its opt-out provisions “as easy to find and as easy to use as possible.”
That won’t be true until opting out is as easy as searching the word “baloney” on Google. And until it is true, Google and its competitors will leave themselves open to further pressure from regulators and politicians, who are studying ways to improve Internet privacy.