Talking About Privacy at Parliament

We headed to Canberra today to talk to the Senate’s Standing Committee on Environment and Communications about online privacy. The Committee is looking at protections for the privacy of Australians online, and we thought it would be useful for us to appear and explain Google’s approach to protecting our users’ privacy. We lodged a submission in August (which you can read here) and presented to the Committee in a hearing this morning.

According to Nielsen, Australians are spending a lot of time online — 86% of Australians have access to the Internet and Internet users aged 16-29 years spent an average of 22 hours online per week. They’re taking advantage of the Internet’s ability to offer greater convenience (such as online banking and bill payment), easier communication with friends and family (such as on email, chat, and photo and video sharing sites), and better access to an entire world of information that would previously have been difficult or impossible to get your hands on. Five or ten years from now there will undoubtedly be even more “must have” online services that we can’t predict today.

At Google, we take privacy very seriously. We are very aware of the trust that users have placed in us, and our responsibility to protect their privacy and data. Without our users’ trust, we have nothing; after all, on the web, competition is only a click away. We have a set of privacy principles that help guide the decisions we make at every level of our company and at every stage of product design which put users in control through transparency and choice.

Here are some examples of what this means in practice. Our Privacy Centre educates users about how to make more informed choices about which products they use, how to use them, and what information they provide to us — and we work hard to keep this site free of tech jargon and legal-speak! We built the Google Dashboard to give you a clear picture of the information you store with Google and quick links to control your personal settings for more than 20 products. We’ve made it easier to move data in and out of Google products with our Data Liberation Front, and you can control the ads you see using our Ads Preferences Manager.

Another key element of good privacy practice is security — meaning, how we keep our systems and your data safe. We invest heavily in security, and it’s at the core of our design and development process. We use automated tools and manual review to help keep our products and services secure, and if a compromise is suspected, we take swift action to protect our users’ information.

Google is committed to empowering Australians to be in control online. With the right information and the right tools, users can make the most of the Internet and the opportunities it brings to every doorstep.

Ishtar Vij, Public Policy and Government Affairs Manager, Google Australia & New Zealand