A haemorrhage of personal privacy

This weekend, a report was released by Privacy International, a London-based watchdog group, which criticized Google for creating “the most onerous privacy environment on the Internet.” The report has received quite a bit of flak for being biased, poorly researched, and incendiary, and Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has an excellent breakdown of the report’s problems.

While Privacy International has probably overstated the case against Google in particular (or at least hasn’t done its research well enough to make a good argument), the overall message of the report is still worth noting. In fact, while the report does point to Google as the worst offender, not one of the 23 Internet companies it reviewed received a top ranking, and the companies that received the highest ranking among those reviewed (“Generally privacy-aware but in need of improvement”) still have some significant problems with the ways in which they handle user data. Privacy International suggests that this is evidence of what it calls “a haemorrhage of personal privacy” on the Internet.