Google Gets Bad Privacy Rating; Who’s To Blame?

Privacy International, a London-based privacy watchdog group, released ratings this week that gave Google the lowest possible grade on protecting the privacy of its users. 22 companies were surveyed, and none of them, not Yahoo or Microsoft or AOL, received such a low ranking.
Why did it happen? There are several schools of thought.
On the one hand, maybe you agree with them. Maybe you look at all the data Google collects and it worries you, knowing that Google has your credit card number, emails, instant messages, computer file system, documents, and that Google search displays phone numbers, satellite imagery, street-level photos, images, blog posts, and just about anything personal about you. It is a scary thought, on the surface.
On another hand, maybe we need to question the organization supplying this analysis. Matt Cutts, a pretty (internet-)famous Googler does, noting a sentence in the report that reads:
Every […]

Original post by Nathan Weinberg