Google product announcements are prompting questions about its ability to gather more potentially sensitive personal information from users.In a mid-October letter to Google directors, Consumer Watchdog said it had "serious privacy concerns" about the browser and the transfer of users' data through Google's services without giving people what it sees as "appropriate transparency and control."
"Google Suggest" sends Google searches as you type, in hopes of anticipating your desires. So if you're keying in "Electoral College 2008 election," Google will offer multiple search queries along the way. First you'd be given results related to the term "electoral," then ones on the Electoral College in general, and finally you'd get links pertaining to Tuesday's presidential vote.
This is what worries Consumer Watchdog: Say you key in something that could be embarrassing or deeply personal, but reconsider before you press "Enter." The autosuggest feature still sends this phrase to Google's servers, tied to your computer's numeric Internet Protocol (IP) address.
Brian Rakowski, the product manager for Chrome, said Consumer Watchdog's fears stemmed from confusion about the role a Google Web browser plays.
"There was some concern that, given a very naive way of how browsers work, you may think, `Now I'm using a Google browser -- Google must know everything on their servers about me,"' he said.
Rakowski said queries sent to Google through the autosuggest feature do include data like a user's IP address and the time at which the queries were made. But Google logs just 2 percent of the information brought in through "Google Suggest," in order to improve the feature, Rakowski said, and anonymizes this data within 24 hours. The anonymization is accomplished by stripping off the last four digits of the IP address associated with the query.
"You're flying blind without that information, so we have to collect a little bit," he said. "But we're really (collecting) the bare minimum we can to provide that service."
The autosuggest function can be shut off in the browser or when using Google's search engine through its home page, but it is not immediately evident how to do so.
One way is through Chrome's "incognito" tab, which turns off the autosuggest feature and lets users surf the Web without revealing their activities to people who have access to the same computer. However, Consumer Watchdog objects to the design of "incognito." The group claims the feature makes users feel that their Web surfing is totally private, while in fact Google is still sending some information back and forth between users' PCs and the company's servers.
Google takes issue with that complaint, too. The "incognito" function lets users surf without leaving a trail of pages visited or "cookie" data-tracking files behind but can't entirely cloak someone's Internet activity from the outside world.
"We try to be very up-front with users when they enter this mode about what it provides and what it doesn't provide," Rakowski said.
Although Chrome is new, Consumer Watchdog is not waiting to see whether it gets too little use to worry about. In October, Court's group wrote U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey to caution him about Google's plans to sell ads for Yahoo, saying that its fears about Google's market power have been exacerbated by Chrome's release.
"It's about having a monopoly over our personal information, which, if it falls into the wrong hands, could be used in a very dangerous way against us," Court said.
Google's senior product counsel, Michael Yang, said the company is not using any data from Chrome to make improvements to its ad services.
But that doesn't mollify privacy critics, who fear Google might start doing that someday to best capitalize on its vast audience. Some 650 million people use Google's search engine and panoply of Web services.
"The way Google has fashioned Chrome, it's a digital Trojan horse to collect even more masses of consumer data for Google's digital advertising business," said Jeff Chester, executive director for the Center for Digital Democracy, a consumer rights organization.
For now, at least, Google is planning to adopt just one change suggested by Consumer Watchdog. When users spell a Web site's address incorrectly, Chrome sends a request to Google to help determine the actual site the user is trying to visit. This happens even when users are surfing "incognito," and Rakowski said it was an oversight.
"It's something we're prioritizing now that we want to fix," he said.
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