Consumer Group Calls on Google to Offer Zero Personal Data Retention Policy

Google should offer users of its search engine the ability to leave no personal data on the Internet giant's servers, the nonpartisan, nonprofit Consumer Watchdog say and are asking for a meeting with Google's chairman to discuss the group's privacy concerns.

In a letter to Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, Consumer Watchdog President Jamie Court and policy advocate John Simpson noted that the search engine Ask.com offers the ability for users' personal data to be removed almost immediately from its servers with its AskEraser service. "We call on you to offer Google's users such a clearly identifiable 'opt out' function on its search engine that is essentially a zero personal data retention policy."

During a question and answer period at a speech in Washington, DC, Schmidt told Simpson that he was "sympathetic" to the group's privacy concerns and told him to arrange a meeting "off line" rather than in front of 200 people, the consumer group says. An online video of that exchange is available.

The letter to Google came after the announcement this week by its rival Yahoo! that it will anonymize personal data it retains after only 90 days. Google currently keeps the data for nine months. European privacy officials have suggested a six-month standard, a limit that Microsoft said it would adopt if all search engine companies adopt the standard.

"This is really about choice," says Simpson. "People should have the right to choose what they do with their personal data and if they provide it all."

To guarantee privacy, Consumer Watchdog says, users need: 1) control over their private data; 2) transparency about how their data is gathered and used; and 3) the right to give informed consent through "opt in" functions, rather than having to sift through pages in order to even locate the "opt out" function, or in its absence, a clearly identifiable and accessible "opt out."

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Homeland Security Data Mining System Raises Privacy Worries, Investigators Say

A planned new data-mining tool from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) raises privacy issues, government investigators warn.

A technique for extracting useful information from large volumes of data, data mining offers potential benefits but also raises privacy concerns when the data include personal information, notes the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which issued a report on the matter.

GAO is the nonpartisan, investigative arm of Congress.

ADVISE is a data mining tool under development intended to help DHS analyze large amounts of information. It is designed to allow an analyst to search for patterns in data—such as relationships among people, organizations, and events—and to produce visual representations of these patterns, referred to as semantic graphs.

None of the three planned DHS implementations of ADVISE that GAO reviewed are fully operational. (GAO says it did not review uses of the tool by the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis.) The intended benefit of the ADVISE tool is to help detect threatening activities by facilitating the analysis of large amounts of data. DHS is currently in the process of testing the tool’s effectiveness.

Use of the ADVISE tool raises a number of privacy concerns, GAO warns.

DHS has added security controls to the tool; however, it has not assessed privacy risks. Privacy risks that could apply to ADVISE include the potential for erroneous association of individuals with crime or terrorism and the misidentification of individuals with similar names. A privacy impact assessment would identify specific privacy risks and help officials determine what controls are needed to mitigate those risks, GAO says.

"ADVISE has not undergone such an assessment because DHS officials believe it is not needed given that the tool itself does not contain personal data. However, the tool’s intended uses include applications involving personal data, and the E-Government Act and related guidance emphasize the need to assess privacy risks early in systems development," GAO says. "Further, if an assessment were conducted and privacy risks identified, a number of controls could be built into the tool to mitigate those risks.

"For example, controls could be implemented to ensure that personal information is used only for a specified purpose or compatible purposes, and they could provide the capability to distinguish among individuals that have similar names to address the risk of misidentification," GAO adds. "Because privacy has not been assessed and mitigating controls have not been implemented, DHS faces the risk that ADVISE-based system implementations containing personal information may require costly and potentially duplicative retrofitting at a later date to add the needed controls."

To ensure that privacy protections are in place, GAO is recommending that the secretary of Homeland Security immediately conduct a privacy impact assessment of the ADVISE tool and implement privacy controls, as needed, to mitigate any identified risks.

GAO says that DHS generally agreed with the content of the GAO report and described actions initiated to address GAO’s recommendations.

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Think That Conversation From Your Office Phone Is Private? Think Again

News reports thata Wal-Mart employee taped telephone conversations between a New York Times reporter and other Wal-Mart employees brings to light the practice of corporations who require employees to consent to company surveillance of calls made through company systems and equipment.

Wal-Mart officials have said the employee in the recently reported case was not authorized to make the recordings and adds that company policy restricts monitoring of employee communications to instances in which fraud or criminal activity is suspected, according to a Vanderbilt University statement.

However, that policy is not a requirement. "We know from recent surveys by groups such as the American Management Association and others that many firms do routinely monitor employee communications that employees might think are private, without cause of suspicion," says Bruce Barry, professor of management and sociology. "This means workers, especially in the private sector, work under the threat that their expressive activity is being watched, which has the effect of chilling free expression that might have nothing to do with the corporation, or that might involve whistleblowing regarding corporate misbehavior."

Barry has focused recent research on free expression in and around the workplace from legal, managerial, and ethical perspectives. He is the author of a soon-to-be-published book on the subject, Speechless: The Erosion of Free Expression in the American Workplace.

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