In times like this when folks are wary of their neighbours thanks to general paranoia being fed to the population, a matter of small consequence has arisen.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7434558.stmPrivacy groups are accusing Google of violating California law in its reluctance to provide a direct link to its privacy policy on its homepage.
The issue has been building momentum following a series of blogs in the New York Times questioning Google's compliance with the California Online Privacy Protection Act of 2003. The law requires any commercial website that collects personal information about its users to "conspicuously post its privacy policy on its website".
Google maintains that it already does and that its privacy policy can be found by going through its search engine or by clicking on "About Google".
In a conference call, a coalition of privacy organisations told journalists that was not good enough and that it had written to Google.
The groups involved include the Electronic Privacy Information Centre, the World Privacy Forum, Consumer Action, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU of Northern California.
Ms Givens, of Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, said: "I went through the exercise of finding [Google's] privacy policy and it's not easy. It's not intuitive and it's not a couple of clicks. You have to work at it.
I have to say this is a ludicrous thing to take Google to task over, I would like to think the organisations above than I support would have better things to do than bandy words with Google over a small word.
