The challenge with an organization like Google is the enormous breadth of information that they store about many of their users. In my case, they know what I search for, what sites I visit, what I buy, the contents of my email, the value of my investments, upcoming events I plan to attend, and the material contained in my online documents. Given that wide range of data that can be personally tied to me, a principle concern with Google is that their privacy policy is not detailed enough to allow me to make truly informed choices about using their services. Nearly every paragraph addresses how most of the data is treated most of the time, but finding hard numbers or technical specifics is difficult to do.

Perhaps of more interest is considering the wider context of the role of privacy policies online. More specifically, given that most company’s policies are similarly devoid of specfic information handling practices, is it possible for the market to take such policies into account when consumers are chosing where to take their business? Similarly, if they had such information, would it actually change their behaviors? Consider the likely outcome if Live Search were to come out with the most detailed and privacy friendly policy of any of the major search engines. I think it highly unlikely that any measurable number of people would change providers on that basis alone. We see, then, the apparent value placed on privacy by the general online population is very low.

Considering that Google has arguably faced the most intense privacy scrutiny of any major internet company, and it has a generally respected reputation of addressing customer concerns, the fact that even it has not provided such detail is telling of how little market pressure there is for companies to become more privacy friendly. Indeed, it seems likely that doing so would run counter to many of their own business interests. As a result, it seems unlikely that we will witness any sort of sea-change in the area of privacy in the near future. We can only hope that as consumers become increasingly reliant on web service providers to handle their data, they will also become more stringent in their expectations of privacy from those whom they chose to do business with.