What were they thinking when they hacked Safari?
Google, rightly or wrongly, has had its share of bumps in the news over the past week. It started Feb 17, when the Wall Street Journal broke the news that Google had bypassed Apple’s Safari browser settings for guarding privacy. (For some strange reason, this never showed up in my local paper.) The default on many browsers is to allow this tracking, but Safari, used on all Apple devices including iPhones, blocks this tracking. Google got around that. Although, after being contacted by the WSJ, Google disabled its code.
Google’s approach to obtaining and sharing information has been to make all information available unless you choose to “opt out” having your information shared. Google claimed that it was only reversing the Safari protection for users who were logged into Google and had turned off the privacy protection on Google. The logic was that if the user was not interested in keeping cookies from Google, they wouldn’t interested in keeping cookies from Safari. There are two issues with this claim:
- The Stanford graduate student who first discovered the problem reported in the WSJ claims that it didn’t matter whether you were signed into Google – everyone had their cookies turned on.
- Even if Google had only enabled the cookie mechanism, it’s not true that the Google users ever said they preferred to have personal advertising.
For the sake of argument, let’s say you actually did have to be signed into Google/have a Google account. What happens when you go through the account creation process? You have to specify your email address and password. There’s also an already checked selection to “Enable Web History.” Clicking on “Learn More” brings up this explanation:
When you create a Google Account, Web History is automatically turned on. Web History offers more relevant search results and recommendations based on your web activity, providing a more personalized experience on Google. You can turn off Web History at any time.
There’s some fine print: two thirds of the way down the page, Google also tells you:
Your Web History is stored on Google servers, so you can view and manage it from any computer by signing in to your Google Account and visiting google.com/history. Learn how to pause your Web History, remove individual items from your Web History, or remove all Web History (and prevent Web History from being recorded in the future).
What Web History is actually doing is enabling cookies and collecting information to be used by Google’s advertisers. To say that people who get an account on Google have indicated they want these cookies (and don’t want Safari to do what it does), may be a bit of a stretch. And having it checked by default is definitely different from the other item required when you create an account – accepting Google’s terms of service, where you are required to click on a button to accept the terms of service and privacy policy. This would be the more expected behavior.
Microsoft says Internet Explorer was also affected by Google’s cookies, that if people had told Internet Explorer to keep out these cookies it would have been overturned there as well. Microsoft also has Internet accounts (Windows Live). Are they doing a better job than Google of informing their customers about what they are doing and making actual decisions? It turns out they also have an opt-in policy, but give you a list of the companies that have set an opt-out option to Internet-based advertising in your browser. You can turn off all or as few as you wish. No evidence at this point that they are collecting information on you if you’re not signed onto Windows Live.
I changed my Google account settings today. And Windows Live. It appears that the way of the Internet – for better or worse – is to collect information on you to give to others unless you ask not to. I’m not sure that’s the best way to do it.
