We get asked about privacy a lot. We recently held a roundtable in Australia to discuss Google's approach to privacy. Here is a summary of what we discussed.
Privacy is a pretty modern concept. There was no such thing as privacy when we humans were all living in the same cave. In the post industrial revolution society, a fairly recent phenomenon in human history, each new information and communications technology - such as cameras, newspapers, radio, TV - has brought convenience and great services, and challenged and changed our notions of privacy.
The Internet has given millions of people access to vast amounts of information and created useful tools and services, and it also presents new challenges for protecting people's 'personal information'.
The concept of privacy is subjective and there is no one size fits all privacy standard. For example, people's attitudes towards sharing personal information about themselves online on social networking sites is more relaxed than in a direct face-to-face environment. Moreover, the privacy expectations of a 21 year old university student will be different from those of an 80 year old grandfather.
Online, companies are supremely accountable to their customers. Competition is one click away, and there is more transparency and accountability than ever. We're exposed to intense scrutiny, and that's a good thing.
Google's mission is to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. We pursue innovative ideas and push the limits of existing technology to provide increased access to information. We recognise our responsibility to protect your privacy. We live and die by your trust. We believe it is possible to deliver leading-edge services and to give you control over your personal information.
Google's approach to privacy is founded on transparency, choice and security. We tell you what information we collect and what we do with it, and we build innovative tools and features that put you in control of your information.
We don't hold data hostage. We protect your personal information and use it responsibly. We don't sell it, we don't collect it without permission, and we don't use it to serve ads without permission. Education is also important. The
Google Privacy Centre, with a wealth of information and videos on each product, is linked directly from the Google home page.
Many Google services, including Search, can be used anonymously - without providing any personally identifying information at all. For products which you use with more personal information such as Gmail, Docs and Picasa, you need to have a Google Account and to log in. Signing in to your Google Account unlocks a personalised experience such as
Web History to give you personalised search results based on your activity when you're signed in. We also give you the ability to share information between the services you use in a way that's transparent to you, such as accessing your Gmail contacts from your Google Calendar or adding an event mentioned in an email to your Google Calendar.
We use information in aggregate form in our server logs to work out how people are using Google and to make overall improvements. We don't need personal information to do this. For example, we use our
aggregated server logs to figure out when something's not working properly or crashes, what website layouts are the fastest to load in your browser, how many users clicked on a particular ad or search result, or how many search results people click on before they find what they're looking for, as well as to
detect spam,
click fraud and viruses. There's more detail in
this blog post from Hal Varian on how Google uses data.
Finally, we believe that the best privacy protection is in
good product design. As the web evolves and our notions of privacy with it, Google will continue to innovate around privacy and build privacy protections into our products from the ground up, as we are doing today with Google Wave.
Posted by Iarla Flynn, Policy Team
