Privacy issues: Facebook and Google poles apart

As the number of users on social networking websites are increasing rapidly, the concern for online privacy is also rising. Recently, Facebook, the world's number one social website has adopted various changes to accommodate privacy concerns to more than 350 million active users. In contrast, Google, the search giant has made news for its apparent disregard for privacy.

Differences in the two's policy

Facebook and Google are totally different about the privacy concerns from the public. While, Facebook is quick to response to criticism and backlash, and announced changes to clear the air against itself, Google CEO Eric Schmidt dismissed privacy concerns entirely. Mr. Schmidt added that the web history will keep track of all of your queries and the sites you visit after performing a search query.

The web history will deliver more relevant results via personalization. Hence, even if users are not signed in their Google account, their browsing habits will still be tracked for the personal search experience. However, any user can view trends in his web activity.

Changes in the Facebook's policy

After the pressure from Canadian government, Facebook has to look into its privacy policies, which has met severe criticism particularly its privacy policy for users, child security, status updates, photos, events, advertising scripts usage, data mining and user's inability to delete their content before closing their accounts.

Under the new policy, Facebook treats that information, which includes users' name, profile picture, current city, gender, networks and the pages that you are a 'fan' of, as 'Publicly Available Information' or 'PAI.' Also, the social site has announced that it will delete all the regional networks altogether, a symbolic gesture of closing the gates.

Google's Privacy Policy

Google, the alternative name for search, holds about 64% of the search share has been facing continuous criticism and concern. Recently, Google's CEO, Mr. Schmidt said that if user has something that he does not want anyone to know, maybe he should not be doing it in the first place. And it is reality that search engines have to retain the information for some time, for example, government authorities can demand the information.

For businesses that use Google web based apps, they actually rely on the level of trust that Google will respect the privacy of that data and protect it from unauthorized access on Google Docs or Gmail. But, after the CEO's statement, users will think twice using Google's solutions.

Therefore, besides using cookies for expanding the scope of personalized search, Google must take the privacy matters seriously.

Discussion

To accommodate the privacy concerns and needs of its users, Facebook had released open draft and seek people's intention last year. In December 2009, the company had announced various changes in the privacy policy, which gives power to its users by changing default settings to be more permissive, like making all status updates public by default as 80 percent of its users stick with those settings. But, Google approach towards privacy is lenient, which concerns many.