A posting by a Stanford grad student recently detailed how Google was following user’s online activities in Apple’s Safari web browser, despite the use of a browser mechanism to block such tracking. Widespread attention to the post brought about by the Wall Street Journal has left the search giant on the defensive.
Rachel Whetstone, Google’s senior vice president of communications and public policy believes that what has happened was been mis-characterized, that Safari “contained functionality that then enabled other Google advertising cookies to be set on the browser.” She said Google engineers did not anticipate this and they were removing these advertising cookies from Safari browsers.
Rep. Mary Bono Mack, R-California, is asking Google to reappear before Congress over this incident. “Google has some tough new questions to answer in the wake of this latest privacy flap, and that’s why I am asking them to come in for another briefing.” Says Bono Mack. “These types of incidents continue to create consumer concerns about how their personal information is used and shared.”
Meanwhile, Representatives Ed Markey, D-Massachusetts, Joe Barton, R-Texas, and Cliff Stearns, R-Florida, sent a letter to the FTC asking if this violates an order for Google to not misrepresent its privacy policies. “Google’s practices could have a wide sweeping impact because Safari is a major web browser used by millions of Americans,” the letter states. “We are interested in any actions the FTC has taken or plans to take to investigate whether Google has violated the terms of its consent agreement.”
Senator Jay Rockefeller, D-West Virginia, implied that the U.S. Senate might step into the fray as well. “According to press reports, Google circumvented consumer choice and may have paved the way for third-party ad networks—including Google’s own DoubleClick—to track consumers against their will,” says Rockefeller. “If so, this practice may have violated the company’s own stated privacy practices. I fully intend to look into this matter and determine the extent to which this practice was used by Google and other third parties to circumvent consumer choice.”
The Electronic Privacy Information Center wrote into the FTC saying, “[Google] took elaborate measures to circumvent the Safari privacy safeguards, and it benefited from the misrepresentations by the commercial value it surreptitiously obtained.”
Source: USA Today
