Now 25 per cent less invasive

We blogged here a while back about Google's woes with the EU Commission. In short, the EU's a bit worried that Google is retaining too much data on its users. Google, it appears, has now backed down a little, and chopped six months off its data retention plan, reducing the period it can keep details of your searches, behaviour and other things from two years to 18 months.
Privacy International released a fairly excoriating report earlier this week, taking to task a number of firms, chief among them good old Google, ranked lower even than the Beast of Redmond, which, you might think, is now a fluffy bunny in comparison. We'd agree if we hadn't seen the videocast Steve Ballmer sent over two weeks ago to the London unveiling of the HTC Touch, but there you go.
Anyway, back to the Privacy International report, which labelled Google a threat to privacy - see the executive summary here for more information on this if you don't feel like wading through the report.

Now, there's a couple of things here. Firstly, let's take a look at PI's specific reasoning behind the black band for Google:

We are aware that the decision to place Google at the bottom of the
ranking is likely to be controversial, but throughout our research we
have found numerous deficiencies and hostilities in Google's approach
to privacy that go well beyond those of other organizations. While a
number of companies share some of these negative elements, none comes
close to achieving status as an endemic threat to privacy. This is in
part due to the diversity and specificity of Google's product range and
the ability of the company to share extracted data between these tools,
and in part it is due to Google's market dominance and the sheer size
of its user base. Google's status in the ranking is also due to its
aggressive use of invasive or potentially invasive technologies and
techniques.

 

According to this open letter from PI, Google's not taken things too well. The letter asks for an apology from Google for a variety of things it is alleged to have told journalists.
One suggestion is that PI - an organisation that's been around for a couple of decades now - is in some way in the pay of Microsoft. Matt Cutts has weighed
in with a fair bit of righteous indignation, and everything looks to be
shaping up for a good old-fashioned internet catfight. It'll all come out in the wash, I'm sure, but in the mean time it'll be good to see what Google has to say on the record.