COX Newspapers Washington Bureau

Home > Plugged In > Archives > 2008 > June > 03 > Entry

Groups to Google: Make the Link

It’s a small thing for a giant Internet company: Adding a simple link to its home page.

But Google Inc. is running afoul with some privacy advocacy groups over just that.

Groups led by the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others on Tuesday released a letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt demanding he put a link on the company’s home page that goes directly to Google’s privacy policy.

Privacy proponents say a link like that is required by California law and also is common practice among big Web companies so visitors have an easy, one-click connection to find out how their personal information is being used.

Google has said it doesn’t want to clutter up its homepage with such a link, according to the groups.

“This is not rocket science,” Marc Rotenberg, Executive Director of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center said in a statement. “And the word ‘privacy’ is not going to take up a lot of space on the Google homepage.”

Except maybe on holidays and other special days when Google adds those fanciful drawings and designs on its home page. Or perhaps if it ever starts adding advertisements to its home page.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment |

Comments

Commenting is open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. M-F

Post a comment



Note: Your e-mail address will be displayed.

Remember me?

There will be a delay of up to 5 minutes before your comment appears.

You may use the following formatting:
Bold: **this text will be bolded** = this text will be bolded
Italic: *this text will be italic* = this text will be italic
Link: [text to be linked](http://www.ajc.com) = text to be linked




*HTML not allowed in comments. Your e-mail address is required.