Does Google respect your privacy? Google is really bad at telling us how it uses our data, and there are documented cases where it has bent or broken the privacy rules meant to protect us. Here are four examples from just this year: 

  1. Have you turned off location settings on your phone, and then felt your privacy was secure? Users of phones running Google’s Android operating system (75% of the world’s smartphone users!) were misled about how that OS collects and uses location data. Google didn’t tell users up front that if they wanted to opt out of having their real-time location data collected every time they walked around with their phone—i.e., for most of us, all the time–they had to find and turn off tracking in not one but two different places. (Reuters Business News, October 28, 2019) 
  2. How private and sensitive is your health information? DeepMind is an AI company owned by Google. Deepminddeveloped something called the Streams app to help doctors identify at-risk patients. They  got into trouble with the UK Information Commissioner in 2017 because they used the data of about 1.6 million patients from a UK hospital without asking patients’ permission. At the time, they tried to defuse privacy concerns by saying no patient data would ever connect to Google. In September 2019, Google rolled the app into its own Google Health division. (BBC News, 18 September, 2019). 
  3. How protected are vulnerable children from privacy invasions? Google has used data they’ve collected to target ads at children. Google-subsidiary YouTube illegally collected personal information from children without their parent’s consent and earned many millions of dollars using it to deliver targeted ads before they got caught. (US Federal Trade Commission, September 4, 2019) 
  4. Are you being surveilled in your own home? The Google Home smart speaker was letting human workers at Google and third parties listen to a small percentage of the things people said to the device in their homes, without making it clear to users that recordings might be used this way. Even though the data was anonymized, the creep factor in a speaker that provides access to private words in private homes was high enough the program was cancelled when it was revealed—but that only happened after a leak of confidential audiodata.(CNET, July 2019) 
  5. A hidden microphone in your thermostat: Google said it was “an error on our part” when their Nest smart thermostat was revealed to have a microphone whose existence was never published in device specifications; until February this year, no one who installed a Nest device in their home had any idea there was a microphone in it just waiting to be activated. (CNBC, February 21, 2019) 

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