Google to Pay $17 Million to Settle Privacy Case

cold fjord writes "The New York Times reports, 'Google agreed on Monday to pay $17 million to 37 states and the District of Columbia ... The case involved Google's bypassing of privacy settings in Apple's Safari browser to use cookies to track users and show them advertisements in 2011 and 2012. Google has said it discontinued circumventing the settings early last year, after the practice was publicly reported, and stopped tracking Safari users and showing them personalized ads. ... the case is one of a growing pile of government investigations, lawsuits and punishments related to privacy matters at the company. They include cases involving a social networking tool called Buzz, illegal data collection by Street View vehicles and accusations of wiretapping to show personalized ads in Gmail. '" From the DOJ, the settlement (PDF).

Re:What law did Google break?

[Anonymous Coward]

First four entries in Appendix A on the PDF that you are having trouble with:

• Alabama Deceptive Trade Practices Act, Ala. Code 8-19-1 through 8-19-15
• Arizona Consumer Fraud Act, Ariz. Rev. Stat. Ann. 44-1521, et seq.; Ariz. Rev. Stat. Ann. 13-2316(A)(6) and (D); Ariz. Rev. Stat. Ann. 44-7301, et seq
• Arkansas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, Ark. Code Ann. 4-88-101 through 115; Arkansas Computer-Related Crimes Act, Ark. Code Ann. 5-41-106; Consumer Protection Against Computer Spyware Act, Ark. Code Ann. 4-111-101 through 105
• California - Cal. Bus & Prof. Code 17200, et seq.; Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code 17500; Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act, Cal. Penal Code 502

All 37 states plus the District of Columbia are represented in the appendix.

Re:violation of trust

[Savage-Rabbit]

There is a diverse range of companies. Alternatives include Microsoft or Yahoo.

Yeah I'm sticking to Google too. Nothing prevents the alternatives from being worse.

Actually Google has pretty fierce competition these days from Bing, the caliber of Bings competitiveness is simply not acknowledged on Slashdot for religions reasons. While several recent studies have refuted Microsoft's BingItOn claim of two thirds of users preferring Bing results. Interestingly enough blind studies also suggest that that Bing actually delivers superior results to Google 41% of the time and 6% of the time they tied. Furthermore a lot of Bing's inferiority is largely perceived (i.e a 'halo' effect of the Google brand), people actually pick Bing results over Google results much of the time when you swap the brands on the search results. Myself I prefer Bing image results to Googles much of the time, the image search results from Bing often contain less noise.

[cite] [surveymonkey.com]
[cite] [networkworld.com]

That last link seems pretty negative at first but it also concludes:

There are two potential, contradictory reactions to the Ayers study:

It either conclusively or largely disproves the Bing preference claims;
  * Putting aside the Bing advertising claims, the search engine performed relatively well vs. Google.
  * Google won 53 percent of the time and Bing won 41 percent of the query tests, with a tie in 6 percent of instances. That suggests that Bing has the capacity to gain much more market share than it currently has (67 percent vs. 18 percent).

Ayers points out that the more assertive "prefer Bing 2:1 claim has been replaced on the Bing It On website with the more limited claim that "people prefer Bing."

I remember when Bing's market share was far down in the sub 10% range not that long ago.