Recently a group called Privacy International has complained about Google and its somewhat opaque policies on privacy. This is, in many ways, a non-story as is the escalation as Google folk respond and dish the dirt on PI and PI responds and writes a letter to Google's CEO complaining about the Google response.

I'm not going to comment on the initial charge – the Google response seems pretty fair but I'm sure that PI are partially correct and Google is not a paragon of privacy perfection. In other words this is no more than business as usual and the revelations, to the extent that they are revelations, are not particularly shocking but are a useful reminder about the dangers in the way the Internet can make it easy to lose one's privacy. However, despite that the story does bring up some interesting points:

Firstly, and cynically, it occurs to me that if I wanted to raise the profile of my tiny organization and get lots of publicity and, hence, financial etc. support, then picking an enemy like Google would be a fairly good strategy. Google is big and familiar, it is also fairly well trusted and doesn't have the reputation for relentless revenge that some other large software companies do. In other words it is a pretty safe target and attacking it is a low risk way to get free publicity from journalists and bloggers (such as this one).

Secondly if Google did respond primarily by smearing PI and the smear is as baseless as PI claims (both statements that I can't be bothered to investigate for third party corroboration) then, assuming that lots of publicity ensues, we will have yet further evidence that it isn't the crime that hurts but the cover up.

Thirdly, no matter whether this is a manufactured scandal or whether Google is evil, it is further evidence that people are becoming more and more worried about privacy and the Internet. Another recent example would be the Apple embedded email address item noted by my colleague recently. This can only be a good thing in my opinion. Privacy (or the lack thereof) does not appear to have been a subject that the majority of Internet users have thought about and it certainly hasn't been something that many Internet software designers seem to have put a high priority on. With luck this is changing.