Following reports from ,Privacy International, a London-based organization focused on privacy intrusions by government and businesses,that analyzed the privacy practices of 22 Internet companies. Google received the lowest mark, followed by Yahoo, Windows Live Spaces, Hi5, Apple and AOL.
Reacting to this Google is thinking up a new cookie recipe!
Google Inc is scaling back how long it keeps personally identifiable data accumulated from its Web users.The world's top provider of Web search services said late on Monday that it is ready to curtail the time it stores user data to a year-and-a-half, the low end of an 18 to 24 month period it had originally proposed to regulators in March.
Google said it was studying how it can meet the concerns of European regulators over cookies, a widely-used consumer tracking technology that Web sites rely on to customize what users see and advertisers use to target ads.
"We are exploring ways to redesign cookies and to reduce their expiration," Fleischer states. "We plan to make an announcement about privacy improvements for our cookies in the coming months.
Privacy continues to be the Achilles' heel of Google, even though they didn't release millions of search queries that contained personal information (like AOL) or sent people to jail (like Yahoo).
