Google is facing an uphill battle against Privacy Advocates around the globe who are upset that Google is not in compliance with California State Law when it comes to Privacy Policies.

Last week, a coalition of groups that have questioned Google's practices in the past sent a four-paragraph letter to CEO Eric Schmidt, charging that "Google's reluctance to post a link to its privacy policy on its home page is alarming."

The signatories include the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, Center for Digital Democracy, and World Privacy Forum.

Google has provided the following public response:

"We share the view that privacy information should be easy to find, and we believe our privacy policy is readily accessible to our users. Just as importantly, privacy information should be easy to understand. That's why, in addition to offering a Privacy Center with our privacy policy and other important information, we also created a YouTube privacy channel with videos explaining our practices and products, ran an ad campaign to draw consumers to our privacy information, posted several blogs that explain our privacy practices in detail and posted detailed frequently asked questions to help consumers understand the complex aspects of privacy. Privacy policies can be complex and not consumer friendly. To truly help consumers understand privacy, our goal is to provide accessible and useful information."

Google argued that having a link to a privacy policy may not be the best method to convey privacy information to consumers.

"Privacy policies can be complex and not consumer friendly," stated Google. "To truly help consumers understand privacy, our goal is to provide accessible and useful information."

"California law requires the operator of a commercial Web site to 'conspicuously post its privacy policy on its Web site,'" the letter says. "The straightforward reading of that law is that Google must place the word 'privacy' on the Google.com Web page linked to its privacy policy. Moreover, just about every major company that operates a Web site places a link to its privacy policy on its homepage."


From InformationWeek:

Aesthetic treason though it may be to clutter the nearly pristine Google.com with an additional seven letters, Google really ought to comply, even if doing so results in a slight statistical diminution of "user happiness" -- Google's measure of how pages perform. (Believe it or not, Google pays a lot of attention to tiny details that affect page load times and user response. Tenths of seconds matter to Google.)

Clearly, Google is not keen to set a precedent that anyone with a grievance is entitled to redress on its home page. But the company has to make sure its public statements about privacy remain consistent with its actions. And it just looks bad for Google to insist that it reads the law differently than everyone else. It makes Google look like it's trying to pull one over on its users.

Google's stance is particularly perplexing given that in 2005 and 2006 the company publicly resisted the U.S. Department of Justice's demand for user search data to protect user privacy. Google associate general counsel Nicole Wong said at the time in a blog post that Google worried that "if the government was permitted to require Google to hand over search queries, that could have undermined confidence that our users have in our ability to keep their information private."

What could boost user confidence in Google's ability to keep user information private more than a prominent privacy policy? (Aside from deciding not to store any user data for any purpose.)

At Google's recent developer conference, VP of search products Marissa Mayer said that the "©2008 Google" notice on the Google home page exists as punctuation, to alert users that the page has loaded completely. Why not replace it with a "Privacy" link, since the copyright notice isn't legally necessary?

It is our opinion that Google is not adhering to it's own "Don't be evil" motto by not complying with this important law. Perhaps some visitors to Google.com would cease using the site if they had a visible link to the Google Privacy Policy and actually read over the whole policy.

Is Google opening itself up to unnecessary litigation by refusing to comply with this simple law which was established to protect consumers?