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Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Google: "We Protect Your Privacy" (attention, fiction)

“Here at Google, we take our user’s privacy very seriously. In fact, we’re not even allowing ourselves to joke about this topic – yes, it’s that serious. To give you an idea, here is some of the data we don’t pass on to anyone outside our 10,000+ employee company (provided there’s no subpoena making us pass it on, and provided there’s nothing we define as “imminent harm“; and even if we pass something on, we make sure third parties have privacy policies like ours):

As you can see – and we don’t think we need to offer additional proof for this other than our word, like the time we said we “don’t do evil” and then never did evil – all your data is safe with us and our employees. Again, except for those subpoeanas (and assuming we will not be hacked, and that no service exploits will be found), but to quote from our PDF on the subject of log retention which we linked from our blog ...

How many subpoenas for server log data does Google receive each year?

As a matter of policy, we don’t provide specifics on law enforcement requests to Google.

... you can see we don’t even share info on what we’re sharing – we’re that privacy aware! In fact, we urge you to increase your trust with us if there’s still a doubt lingering with you. Because, in the words of our chief executive officer Eric Schmidt this year:

We are very early in the total information we have within Google.

And:

We cannot even answer the most basic questions because we don’t know enough about you. That is the most important aspect of Google’s expansion.

Please visit our new Google Privacy Channel at YouTube to find out more. We won’t tell anyone which videos you watched. Unless they’re really funny ones. (Kidding!!!)”

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