Google at Bottom of International Privacy Ranking Study

The NGO Privacy International has just published the results of a 6-month investigation into the privacy practices of companies such as Amazon, BBC, Facebook, Google, Wikipedia and Yahoo!

Entitled A Race to the Bottom: Privacy Ranking of Internet Service Companies.

The study placed Google at the bottom of the list of 20 firms studied:

"We are aware that the decision to place Google at the bottom of the ranking is likely to be controversial, but throughout our research we have found numerous deficiencies and hostilities in Google’s approach to privacy that go well beyond those of other organizations. While a number of companies share some of these negative elements, none comes close to achieving status as an endemic threat to privacy. This is in part due to the diversity and specificity of Google’s product range and the ability of the company to share extracted data between these tools, and in part it is due to Google’s market dominance and the sheer size of its user base. Google’s status in the ranking is also due to its aggressive use of invasive or potentially invasive technologies and techniques".