Class action over Google privacy
2010-10-26 21:52
Washington - Google is being targeted in a class action lawsuit that alleges the search engine violates users' privacy by sharing their personal information and internet search queries with third parties.
"User search queries, which often contain highly sensitive and personally identifiable information, are routinely transferred to marketers, data brokers, and sold and resold to countless other third parties," the complaint said.
"Not only does Google, whose company motto is 'Don't be evil,' promise in its privacy policy not to do this, but Google has publicly denounced this very practice in the past," the attorneys behind the suit said in a statement.
The suit was filed on Monday in a US District Court in San Jose, California, on behalf of a woman named Paloma Gaos, a resident of the San Francisco area, and other users of the hugely popular search engine.
The complaint seeks monetary damages and an injunction against Google ordering it to stop sharing search results with third parties.
"Because of its dominance in the search business, Google, more than any other company, presents a great risk to citizen privacy," said Kassra Nassiri, one of the attorneys bringing the suit.
A Google spokesperson told AFP the company had not yet received a copy of the complaint and "won't be able to comment until we've had a chance to review it".
Google denies transmitting users' personally identifiable information to third parties and says it "anonymises" the results of web queries, removing all traces of personally identifiable information.
