Google Bashed as Worst Privacy Offender

They dropped their "don't be evil" motto for a reason

(Image used under: Creative Commons 2.0 [SRC])

Privacy International has released a report of privacy scores for top Internet companies and Google was notably the only one to receive the lowest ranking.

Not everyone agrees with this assessment, but I personally tend to side with Privacy International.

I like Google and use it constantly because of it's clean, simple interface and solid dependable results. However, when it comes to privacy, I don't think they're where they should be. They recently announced they'd annonymize all search records after 2 years, but that only announced to the world that they track searches to individual people and store that information for 2 years!

They say they need it for optimization, but I still haven't heard of anything they do that actually needs personally identifiable information to be optimized other than revenue streams from selling the data.