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Despite what the spinmeisters over at Google's Public Policy Blog would have you believe, the Internet giant is facing tough...

Four members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet, on Monday ...

I'm just back from a sweltering week in Washington, DC, convinced that those of us who care about protecting consumers' online privacy have reason for optimism.  There is growing interest in creating a "Do Not Track...

The nonprofit group Consumer Watchdog is seeking to determine the extent of the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration's use of Google Earth in its investigations, spokesman John M. Simpson said last week. Federal contracting records reviewed by Consumer Watchdog show that the FBI has spent more than $600,000 on Google Earth since 2007. The Drug Enforcement Administration, meanwhile, has spent more than $67,000. Simpson has called on Congress to investigate how U.S. law enforcement and intelligence communities are using Google technologies. The group says it has concerns that data could be used for racial profiling.

A Santa Monica-based consumer watchdog group this week decried a proposal by Google and Verizon Communications that it says would put an end to net neutrality and create a system of pay-to-play haves and have-nots when it comes to internet access.

A Wall Street Journal article this week details how Google is increasingly moving to maximize profits  from the vast amount of personal data it has amassed in its global network of servers at the expense of consumers' privacy.

Verizon Communications Inc. and Google Inc. urged U.S. regulators to leave wireless Internet services outside most policies that are designed to prevent carriers from making some websites perform better than others.  Consumer Watchdog, a consumer group based in Santa Monica, said the proposal "completely undermines the future of the Internet" because the wireless use of the Web is gaining in popularity.

Proposal Would Let Internet Providers Favor Some Services

Smaller Internet companies wouldn't be able to keep pace. "Ultimately, consumers would pay the costs for the premium delivery, or worse, would never see the content of smaller companies," says John Simpson, director of advocacy group Consumer Watchdog. "Google claims it won't use premium channels for delivery, but not long ago they professed to defend true net neutrality."

A big New York foundation once told me years ago that privacy is the last thing people in the developing world have to worry about. It was a nice way of saying no to funding for my consumer group's privacy project, but the line rang out to me with the recent exposures about big tech's privacy problems.

SANTA MONICA, CA -- Google and Verizon's new joint broadband proposal pays lip service to the idea of "net neutrality," but actually would completely undermine the open and free Internet we enjoy, Consumer Watchdog said today.

Is Internet Giant’s Technology Being Used to Spy On Americans?

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The FBI and DEA are now making extensive use of Google Earth, according to federal spending records. Consumer Watchdog is filing Freedom of Information Act requests with the agencies today to determine how the Internet giant’s digital mapping technology is being used for domestic surveillance, including whether it is used for racial profiling or other abuses of civil liberties.

Google Inc. and Verizon Inc. in a joint conference call Monday spoke out against blocking, prioritizing or slowing down wired Internet traffic. Santa Monica-based Consumer Watchdog, however, said that while the new broadband proposal "pays lip service to the idea of net neutrality," it would actually "completely undermine the open and free Internet we enjoy." John M. Simpson, consumer advocate with the nonpartisan, nonprofit public interest group, said there are two main problems with the proposal.

Milo Yiannopoulos Wonders if the Company's Glory Days Are Ancient History

Google has admitted to “accidentally” retrieving and storing masses of personal information, including snippets of emails, while trawling for public WiFi spots. The accidents occurred over a period of four years in 30 countries. Interpreting this bombshell charitably, we might say it was a major and avoidable blunder that cost the company a lot of good will and trust. But groups like Consumer Watchdog suggest that Google was just seeing what it could get away with, and that we wouldn’t know about it at all if they hadn’t got busted: “Its computer engineers run amok, push the envelope and gather whatever data they can until their fingers are caught in the cookie jar.”  

SAN FRANCISCO — Online freedom advocates fear that Google is changing allegiance in the battle to stop Internet service providers from giving preferential treatment to those that pay. Nonprofit group Consumer Watchdog portrayed any compromise by Google on net neutrality as a betrayal. "Apparently Google redefines principles to suit the business need of the moment," said John Simpson, a consumer advocate with the group. "What Google and Verizon are trying to do is carve up the Internet behind closed doors for their own benefit."

SANTA MONICA, CA — Google is compromising a long standing principle it claimed to support in an effort to boost profits as it backs away from a key premise of an open Internet — “net neutrality,” Consumer Watchdog said today. Net neutrality — the idea that all data is treated equally by Internet service providers — is a key principle of the Internet.  Google has long claimed to be an advocate of the principle.  Today both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times reported that Google and Verizon are close to a deal that would let Verizon speed some online content more quickly to Internet users if content providers paid for the privilege.

Investors at the CIA and Google are backing a company called "Recorded Future" that monitors tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts in real time in order to find patterns, events and relationships that may predict the future. The news comes amidst Google’s so-called "Wi-Spy" scandal, that refers to revelations that Google’s Street View cars operating in some thirty countries snooped on private Wi-Fi networks over the last three years.

According to a new poll from Consumer Watchdog a major part of Americans are very concerned about the privacy issues arousing from Google’s Street View data collection. Much covered reports about Google’s gathering private information from users’ WiFi networks make US consumers doubt in the efficiency of privacy protection measures implemented today, they want better privacy protections put in place.

Web consumers are concerned about Google's collection of data over wireless networks, but still give the search engine and Web services provider a favorable rating of 74 percent. That's the latest from a poll conducted by Google watchers Consumer Watchdog and Grove Insight, which also found citizens are concerned about their privacy.

The three-hour hearing on Online Consumer Privacy has just come to a close, but unfortunately nothing substantive has emerged. Senators asked the two panels questions that were fed to them by their staff, and, when responses came from Google & Facebook that were conciliatory-sounding enough, the Senators refused, or perhaps more likely did not know how, to ask follow-up questions that might have actually taken us somewhere.

Google Privacy Engineering Lead Dr. Alma Whitten told the Committee that the company was "conducting investigations" into why its Street View cars gathered communications from home WiFi networks.