Tag Archives: FTC

Don’t be evil

Posted on by at 7:00 am

According to this report from the Wall Street Journal, Google has been secretly tracking users of the Safari browser on iPhones and computers even though such users had changed their settings to block tracking.

Google Inc. and other advertising companies have been bypassing the privacy settings of millions of people using Apple Inc.’s Web browser on their iPhones and computers—tracking the Web-browsing habits of people who intended for that kind of monitoring to be blocked.

The companies used special computer code that tricks Apple’s Safari Web-browsing software into letting them monitor many users. Safari, the most widely used browser on mobile devices, is designed to block such tracking by default.

Google disabled its code after being contacted by The Wall Street Journal.

This is a company that is in the midst of a total rewrite of its privacy policies in order to allow it to compile and cross-reference information across all its platforms to create a  complete data on its users.   The FTC should immediately investigate whether this tracking violates Google’s existing privacy policies.

More from the EFF.

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Don’t be evil?

Posted on by at 4:47 pm

“Don’t be evil” is Google’s informal motto. Since the FTC is launching a major anti-trust probe of the company, according to the WSJ, we may find out how true it is.

The FTC’s preparations to subpoena Google are the first concrete signal that its commissioners have decided there is enough evidence to move forward with a formal investigation. The FTC’s probe is expected to take a year or more to unfold. Though the outcome is uncertain, the agency fought hard with the Justice Department to handle the case, said people familiar with the investigation, and so is thought to be unlikely to walk away without taking any action. The FTC and Justice Department share responsibility for enforcing federal antitrust laws.