By Kim Yoo-chul
A respected global privacy expert said Thursday that U.S.-based search giant Google is the ``No. 1’’ global privacy problem because Google’s culture is demonstrably hostile to privacy.
At a forum organized by The Korean Council on the Protection of Personal Information (KCPPI) held at a Seoul hotel, Scott Cleland, the author of ``Search & Destroy: Why You Can’t Trust Google Inc.,’’ strongly criticized the U.S. tech giant for its forced integrated privacy policy, saying that the policy pushes the world towards lowest common denominator privacy standards.
``The decisions by the Fair Trade Commission and Department of Justice (USDOJ) have amounted to a unilateral disarmament of law enforcement power in an entire area of anti-trust oversight ― privacy ― perversely encouraging an anything-goes-environment and systemic abuse,’’ Cleland slammed.
His remarks have been taken seriously in South Korea in the light of recent developments on the same subject matter coming out of Brussels. The European Union says a recent change in Google’s privacy policy, allowing it to combine and share data collected from all of its different services, breaches European privacy law.
A total of 27 separate EU regulators recently sent a letter to Google calling on the company to make its policies clearer to users. Since March, this year, data collected by one Google service can be shared with its other platforms ― Gmail can share with YouTube and vice versa.
``In the wrong hands, these unique Google forced-integrated policies create increased danger to individuals, risk to groups, companies, organizations and sovereign nations of theft, extortion, fraud, terrorism, manipulation of markets and law enforcement. This is not the amount of private information on everyone that should be collected in free countries without the meaningful permission,’’ Cleland said.
Cleland, who is also the president of Precursor LLC, stressed that Google is in an epic battle over privacy default standards.
Privacy experts are calling on Google to offer greater disclosure to its users as well as allow them to grant or withhold their consent for any personal information sharing. Google is still backing up its systems.
In a statement, Google said it believes its new policy complies with laws and added that it will improve the user experience by better targeting advertisers and personalizing search results.
But Cleland disagrees, arguing that, “information is power. Google’s unfathomable omni-collection of private data and surveillance of private activity power is unprecedented in global scale, scope, efficiency, effectiveness and totality.’’
The expert, who is a leading telecom analyst in the United States and was a senior policy advisor to the U.S. federal government, told participants that ``Google’s info-driven monopoly creates a unique global privacy problem. The original problem is exponentially-exacerbated by the global surveillance of private information/activity enabled by Google’s spreading monopoly power into video, mobile and social.’’
But the bottom line according to the expert is that ``Google’s pervasive permission-less profiling is a prodigious privacy problem.’’
With 1 billion monthly unique users of Google search and 89 percent global search market share, Google is the world’s largest DNS provider. Google controls 57 percent ad-serving share and it commands 44 percent of the global online advertising market, according to market research firms.