Now I don't know Matt Cutts personally, but I have seen him speak at SES shows and have even visited the Googleplex where he and other Google engineers were nice enough to "shoot the breeze" with some of us in attendance. Although he is considered a Google Rockstar, he appears to be a straight up, decent guy. Nice guy, not too confrontational... so when he gets mad it is a rare occurrence.
Earlier today, Matt has posted about his frustration on a recent report from Privacy International regarding Google receiving the lowest possible score. Matt makes some excellent points as to why Google should receive higher marks over some of the other engines. Case in point:
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Google didn’t leak user queries - In this past year, AOL released millions of raw queries from hundreds of thousands of users. Within days, a journalist had determined the identity of an AOL user from the queries that AOL released. But AOL got a better grade than Google.
- Google didn’t give millions of user queries to the Dept. of Justice - AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo all gave some amount of users’ queries to the Department of Justice.
Others in the industry (such as Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan) tend to agree with Matt. I also would agree and feel that Privacy International has lost some credibility. Privacy is a touchy subject no question, but we can honestly say that Google is not the worse offender out there. They are looking to organize and provide the world's data to search users out there. They are bound to step on people's toes some times... but I can think of a lot of other sources that are far worse when it comes to privacy issues.
Matt's full post can be found here.
Labels: Google privacy issues, matt cutts
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