An Asian report published today states that a global information technology expert has openly slammed Google's business practices, calling it "deceptive." He stressed the importance of increased awareness to protect public institutions' information. Jeff Gould, president of SafeGov, a U.S.-based non-profit organization that promotes Internet privacy and security, criticized the search giant's intentional withholding of how much data they are gathering from consumers.
"They are not completely honest about how much you are giving them. They know what they are doing but they don't want to tell people because they know it will be criticized," he said. "They have this very extreme idea that they want to know everything. What Google is doing is far more extreme than the data leaking before."
Google and other multinational giants reap a large part of their profits from Internet advertising. Companies offering free services, in exchange, get a view of consumers' email, searches and call history among other information to decipher individual preferences to better promote their ads.
"There is a huge data amount just about you. They analyze it endlessly and all of it goes to predicting which ads you are going to click on," said Gould.
SafeGov's focus has been on the use of cloud services in government agencies, schools and companies. "In these organizations, it is really not OK for Google to be reading their email," said Gould. "It's OK for Google to read my email, with my permission, because I'm just a consumer. But if it's the police department of Los Angeles, they should not.
According Gould's most recent article titled "Will European privacy regulators raise the bar for government cloud computing?" – He notes that the key development looming on the horizon in Europe is the proposed new EU Data Protection Regulation. This draft legislation represents a sweeping revision of the 1995 EU Privacy Directive and is currently the subject of intense scrutiny by interested stakeholders. Observers expect it to be passed by the EU Parliament sometime in early 2014. In the short term, the most significant event is the investigation of Google's privacy policy that the French Data Protection Authority is conducting at the request of the Article 29 Working Party (the association of European DPAs).
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