Google succumbs to privacy advocates

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By Matthew Sparkes

Posted on 8 Jul 2008 at 11:33

Google has succumbed to pressure from privacy advocates and brought its homepage into compliance with California law.

Placing information on privacy policies one click away from the homepage is a legal requirement for companies in California, but until now the minimalist aesthetic of the homepage has been a greater priority for Google.

However, several privacy organisations recently wrote an open letter to Google's CEO Eric Schmidt asking for the link to be added in plain sight.

"California law requires the operator of a commercial web site to 'conspicuously post its privacy policy on its website'. The straightforward reading of that law is that Google must place the word 'privacy' on the Google.com webpage linked to its privacy policy. Moreover, just about every major company that operates a website places a link to its privacy policy on its homepage," says the letter, which is signed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, among other organisations.

Despite being obsessed with minimising the word count of its site, Google has now managed to fit the short word in next to the copyright symbol - but only after "Google" was trimmed to make way for it.

"The new "Privacy" link goes to our Privacy Centre, which was revamped earlier this year to be more straightforward and approachable, with videos and a non-legalese overview to make sure you understand in basic terms what Google does, does not, will, and won't, do in regard to your personal information," says Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience in a blog post.

Google is also rolling out a new feature in GMail this week which shows a log of which computers have been used to log-in to accounts in the past. The feature will also list on how many machines the account its currently active and enable users to remotely log out from a certain machine.