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WSJ: Former FTC Employee Files Complaint Over Google Privacy

WSJ: “A former Federal Trade Commission employee has filed a complaint with the agency accusing Google Inc. of not adequately protecting the privacy of consumers’ search queries. The complaint was filed September 6 by Christopher Soghoian, who worked until August as a technologist with the FTC’s Division of Privacy and Identity Protection. It calls on the agency to investigate Google and to “compel Google to take proactive steps to protect the privacy of individual users’ search terms.” The complaint alleges Google shares with third parties users’ search queries, including those that contain personal information. In an emailed statement, Google said its passing of search-query data to third parties “is a standard practice across all search engines” and that “webmasters use this to see what searches bring visitors to their websites.” The statement added, “Google does not pass any personal information about the source of the query to the destination website.”

  • Via Christopher Soghoian’s blog posting: “The complaint centers around an obscure feature in web browsers, known as the HTTP referrer header. Danny Sullivan, a widely respected search engine industry analyst has written that the HTTP referrer header is “effectively the Caller ID of the internet. It allows web site owners and marketers to know where visitors came from.” However, while practically everyone with a telephone knows about the existence of caller ID, as Danny also notes, the existence of the referrer header is “little known to most web surfers.” This header reveals to the websites you visit the URL of the page you were viewing before you visited that site. When you visit a site after clicking on a link in a search engine results page, that site learns the terms you searched for (because Google and the other search engines include your search terms in the URL).
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