Protesters had said that the link was a legal requirement, but
Google had said that it was not prepared to add more words to its
near-empty home page.
The company has relented and now the Google home page contains
the word 'privacy' near the bottom and beside the copyright notice.
The word is a link to a page containing all Google's privacy
information.
Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and
user experience, said that Page and Brin told her that the link
could be put on the home page only if another word was taken
off.
"Google values our users' privacy first and foremost. Trust is
the basis of everything we do, so we want you to be familiar and
comfortable with the integrity and care we give your personal
data," said Mayer in a Google blog post. "We added this link both
to our homepage and to our results page to make it easier for you
to find information about our privacy principles."
"Larry and Sergey told me we could only add this to the homepage
if we took a word away - keeping the "weight" of the homepage
unchanged at 28 [words]," she said. "Given that the new Privacy
link fit best with legal disclaimers on the page, I looked to the
copyright line. There, we dropped the word "Google" (realizing it
was implied, obviously) and added the new privacy link alongside
it."
The company has faced significant pressure over the issue. A
coalition of US privacy and consumer groups wrote an open letter to
the company earlier this year outlining its case that the link is a
legal requirement.
Those groups said that the California Online Privacy Protection
Act, a law passed in 2004, forces companies to publish a link to a
privacy policy that. "a text link that hyperlinks to a Web page on
which the actual privacy policy is posted [is sufficient] if the
text link is located on the homepage or first significant page
after entering the Web site," they quoted the law as saying.
In Europe, the Article 29 Working Party, an independent European
advisory body on data protection and privacy, interpreted Europe's
data protection regime as requiring such a link.
It published an opinion in April 2008 that said: "most internet
users are unaware of the large amounts of data that are processed
about their search behaviour, and of the purposes they are being
used for".
"If they are not aware of this processing they are unable to
make informed decisions about it. The obligation to inform
individuals about the processing of their data is one of the
fundamental principles of the Data Protection Directive," it
said.
Google's privacy chief Peter Fleischer told OUT-LAW last year
why the company had not changed its home page to include such a
link.
"Google has a very sparse homepage. It’s one of the things that
we’re very proud about. It’s kind of clean and zen-like. Last I
counted I think we had something like 35 words on our homepage," he
said."On ours with only 35 words, we had to keep it very sparse.
Now of course we’re a search engine, so anybody who wants to see
our privacy policy can type 'Google privacy policy' and, trust me,
it will come up as result number one. It’s not hard to find. We’re
a search company. We don’t believe in pushing things into people’s
face. We keep it easy and simple to find."
