Running Head: TRANSPARENCY

Google and On-line Privacy Transparency Alan L. Schroeder ENG 122 Prof. Larry Holden April 7, 2012

Google and On-line Privacy Transparency Have you ever clicked I Agree when signing up for an e-mail account, social media site or on-line shopping account? Did you read the entire License Agreement to find out exactly what you are agreeing to? Or did you just click the easy-to-find, eye-catching red button so you could get on to more important things? The topic of this research paper is personal information, stored with on-line services like Google. More specifically, the researcher is concerned that this information is potentially accessible by the United States Intelligence community. Many times, what the user is agreeing to is the on-line service's acceptable use policy agreement or privacy policy agreement. An acceptable use policy (AUP) is a policy that a user must agree to follow in order to be provided with access to a network or to the Internet. Usually these are used by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and school and work facilities with private networks. Also, certain software and websites that issue the user an account that connects with their private network, require you to abide by these rules. More popular, though, is the agreement that appears whenever you provide personal information to a 'creditable' service on-line. It is common practice for a well-known company to have a privacy policy available to the public that outlines how they will use and safeguard the information that users submit to them. The privacy policy also details if, and with whom, they will share your personal data. If the user does not agree with the privacy policy, then they have little choice but to refrain from using the service. Due to popular demand, most privacy settings can be further customized from within the account settings of the service once the user is logged in. Googles new, consolidated privacy policy requires a user to allow the company to save location information, browsing history, and search terms. It also allows the company to share

that information across multiple services that they own (for example: Gmail, YouTube, Google Search, Google+). Pew Internet and American Life Project writes that Google has maintained that these new policies will benefit users by providing them with more relevant advertising that comes from a broader variety of data on a given user's Internet behavior (Reed, 2012). By mining a larger amount of your personal information, the company hopes to flesh out the user profile that identifies your characteristics to their systems. This user profile is essentially how Googles supercomputers view us as individuals: a compiled array of data representing our likes, dislikes, viewing habits, buying preferences, and favorite people, places and things. These ones and zeros are the only part of your personality that these advanced sorting and ranking algorithms are concerned with. Despite their popularity as a search engine company, Google AdWords (the on-line advertising branch of the company) is the company's real money-maker. By placing advertisements along-side search results, Google hopes users will click through the sponsored results, thereby generating revenue from the individual sponsors who's ads are being placed. Google is paid a certain amount of money (from a few cents up to over a dollar) per click, based on the individual agreement they have with the company being advertised. Having relevant ads increases the probability that the current user will be interested in the product and click on the advertisements. If Google knows more information about the user and their searching and buying habits, it can better display ads for products that the user might realistically use. Google's relevant advertising explanation may be true, but this researcher proposed that if the information is stored on-line, in any fashion, that you must assume that it is accessible by various intelligence agencies, both foreign and domestic. The researcher maintained that if a person is reluctant to reveal their personal interests and behavior patterns to the United States

Government, then they should think twice before allowing any private company to store this data as well. In the interest of national security, in 2001, the United States passed into law the PATRIOT ACT. The purpose, written in the Bill, was To deter and punish terrorist acts in the United States and around the world, to enhance law enforcement investigatory tools, and for other purposes(Congress, 2001). These other purposes turned out to include such controversial topics as incidentally intercepting private communications of American citizens, through wiretaps, or other electronic surveillance. Also since October 25, 1994, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) required telecommunications and broadband Internet service providers to install government back doors to facilitate eavesdropping. CALEA was intended to preserve the ability of law enforcement agencies to conduct electronic surveillance by requiring that telecommunications carriers and manufacturers of telecommunications equipment modify and design their equipment, facilities, and services to ensure that they have the necessary surveillance capabilities (FCC, 1994). The legal groundwork for this type of blatant disregard for American citizen privacy is already in place. This researcher posits that any and all Internet communication is subject to both the CALEA and the PATRIOT Act, because all Internet traffic data is layered on a backbone of telecommunications hardware at some point along its path. Noah Shachtman of Wired wrote, Its not the very first time Google has done business with Americas spy agencies (Shachtman, 2010), in an article explaining how Google and the CIA were both backing a Web-Monitoring start-up company. The author went on to describe how, in the past, Google had enlisted the help of the National Security Agency (NSA) to secure it's networks, sold equipment to secret signals-intelligence group, and even purchased the

Keyhole mapping company which was backed by IN-Q-Tel (the CIA's investment division). Keyhole eventually became the backbone for Google Earth, Google's popular satellite imagery and planet-modeling program. A San Francisco Chronicle reporter wrote, When the nation's intelligence agencies wanted a computer network to better share information about everything from al-Qaeda to North Korea, they turned to a big name in the technology industry to supply some of the equipment: Google Inc.(Kopytoff, 2008). On March 1st, 2012, Jules Polonetsky wrote that "Google's privacy policy consolidation slated to become effective in a few days has captured the lion's share of attention, but it is Apple that has been the most effective at linking consumer data across every aspect of its services" (Claburn, 2012). This is not a Google-only phenomenon, but seemingly an industry shift towards a more open, cross-service approach to handling customer/user information. Perhaps, targeted ads would be a welcome change to getting cluster-bombed with popups and spam e-mail. The researcher has shown how this is a very small reward in exchange for the potential for abuse and violation of individual privacy. Because America has passed numerous laws in the interest of national security, and to combat terrorism, anyone using telephone, mobile/wireless, or Internet services today should also assume that Big Brother is watching their computer monitor, over their shoulder as well.

References: 107th Congress. (2001). Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT ACT) Act of 2001. Text of H.R. 3162 (107th). Retrieved from http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/107/hr3162/text Claburn, Thomas. (2012, March). Google Privacy Changes: 6 Steps To Take. Informationweek (Online). Retrieved from ABI/INFORM Global. (Document ID: 2599814041) Federal Communications Commission. (1994). Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). Retrieved from http://transition.fcc.gov/calea/ Kopytoff, Verne. (2008, March). Google has lots to do with intelligence. San Francisco Chronicle - (Online). Retrieved from http://www.sfgate.com/cgibin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/29/BUQLUAP8L.DTL Reed, Brad. (2012, March). Despite privacy concerns, Google still dominates search engine realm : Google's share of user base has increased dramatically since 2004, Pew finds. Network World (Online). Retrieved from ProQuest Computing. (Document ID: 2607206021) Shachtman, Noah. (2010, July). Exclusive: Google, CIA Invest in Future of Web Monitoring. Wired - (Online). Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/exclusivegoogle-cia/