Wednesday, August 27, 2008
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Google Spy
As to Google:

In the German speaking world about 80 percent of the leading news
websites run Google analytics and/or google syndication resp. 
doubleclick.

See the link at the bottom to an online tool called ontraXX where you
can look up whether the US news websites you read hand over all your
usage data to Google. You should be surprised how many these are.

German and Austrian top news sites send their visitors' clickstreams to
Google for analysis, a service free of charges. Google sends then
[incomplete] sites statistics back.

According to EU data protection laws owners of websites have to inform
their users about their usage data being handed over to third parties.
Neither spiegel.de nor sueddeutsche.de, nor derstandard.at complied to
that when I ran that news story two months ago.

These EU media and many others also violate Google's policy over here in
EU: to add a disclaimer - according to EU laws - on a "prominent place"
on the respective website.

Nobody likes to do that in a EU country, because the disclaimer starts
with a sentence saying: This website uses Google Analytics, a service by
Google, all your traffic data will be stored on a server in the Unites
States of America".

I asked a Google spokesperson in Hamburg, Germany a few months ago on
that matter. What is Google doing to sanction those who violate Google's
policy, by not adding the said disclaimer on a "prominent" place on
their website?

The Google spokesperson answered: "That is a good question. I will check
into that matter". Obviously that checking is still going on as  I have
not heard of him again since mid june.

If you read the leading print news media in Germany or Austria online,
Google is more or less always watching you. All user traffic data go
into one, big pot.

I would not be surprised if the same was the case in the USA. The New
York Times does it and the Washington Post does it well. LA Times uses
all three Google services.

There is no mentioning of Google in the privacy policy of the Washington
Post -to pick one out - just a tiny Google logo a very long scroll away
on the very bottom  on the frontpage.

The ontraXX.net machine description is - I'm afraid to tell - only in
German. But that should not be a problem: Just type in the domain you
wish to check and type in. Amongst "Externe Services"

http://www.ontraxx.net/

The guy who owns that and the related notraxx.net, Walter Karban,
managed to get an altavista license in 1997 and ran a self branded
search engine called "austronaut.at" for a few years. He used that as a
PR tool for his small company because the .at domain was not indexed
that well on altavista or lycos, then.

Servus from Europe
- annonymous

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Wednesday, August 27, 2008 10:53:52 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  |  Related posts:
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