A gaggle of campaigners (NAI, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, Michael Zimmer, etc) push Google to add a link to its privacy policy on its home page, and Google’s refusal sparks snark: for example, “Larry Page, the company’s co-founder, didn’t want a privacy link ‘on that beautiful clean home page,’ said one executive at a Google competitor” (NYT), or “Does Anyone Really Care Where Google Places Its Privacy Policy?” (Techdirt). Google relents, publishes self-congratulatory note on public policy weblog (hardly a surprise). Funny, that: Page didn’t seem to mind the complete redesign of Google‘s Japanese page back in March. (The new design now includes a link to a privacy page).
Lesson: in key respects, Google isn’t monolithic. In fact, a quick survey of “European” Google sites (adapted from some random list of country-code TLDs) turns up interesting data:
The following national/language pages don’t have privacy links: Shqip [Albanian], Bosnia and Hercegovina, Bulgaria, Belarus, Switzerland, Croatia, Iceland, Moldova, Malta, Norway, Slovenia, Slovakia, and Ukraine.
The following national/language pages do have privacy links: Andorra, Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Finland, France, Georgia, Greece, Gibraltar, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, the Isle of Man, Italy, Jersey, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxemburg, Latvia, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Spain, Sweden, San Marino, Turkey, and the UK.
Obviously, for this set of countries EU membership is a major distinguishing factor (there are almost certainly other factors as well); still, the decision to promote a privacy link to (roughly speaking) the citizens and/or residents of banking havens like Andorra, Gibraltar, the Isle of Man, Jersey, and Liechtenstein but not to those of ex-Yugoslav and major former Soviet republics can be seen as pretty provocative.
The disposition of privacy laws, regulations, and customs in a given country is a creature of that country’s past—which in many of these countries has involved successive waves of vicious state and civil brutality. In this context, “privacy” isn’t just a preference that a consumer checks off in the comfort of his or her sun-drenched home in Mountain View: as Yahoo’s dealings with the Chinese government made clear, the consequences can be devastating. Given recent events—telecom companies (except Qwest) enabling illegal mass-spying in the US, Russia’s aggressive program of taking foreign investiture in oil, and so on—there’s good reason to believe that privacy issues will play an important role in some very high-stakes political events in the upcoming years.
The placement of a privacy link may seem trivial—in fact, in itself, I think it is trivial (though no more so than an overweening emphasis on front-page aesthetics). But peculiarities about how even trivia like this is implemented can reveal a lot about corporate attitudes and behavior. In this case, Google’s convenient exceptionalism shows how it defers to the varied and minimal standards of national laws rather than defining a rigorous, affirmative standard and applying it transnationally. In doing so, it’s acknowledging that the governments of the states in which it operates will decide whether and when it will “be evil.”
There’s much more that could be done with a simple comparison of Google’s various national and language-specific front pages, but I’ll leave that to real privacy advocates.