FTC Drops Privacy Inquiry against Google:
A Statement by Steve Pociask, American Consumer Institute
October 28, 2010
America’s consumers should be extremely disturbed that the Federal Trade Commission has chosen to let Google off lightly on the serious charge of collecting sensitive personal information from consumers, potentially names, addresses, emails, passwords and usernames. Thirty-eight state attorney generals, as well as officials in Canada, Europe and Asia are all aggressively investigating this breach of privacy law, while our FTC has chosen to sweep it under the rug without a serious investigation. Allowing such a dominant company to get a free pass on such flagrant privacy violations seems to be a serious abandonment of the FTC’s mission.
Unfortunately, this appears to be part of a pattern by regulators in this administration to ignore concerns about Google. The FTC and Administration need to avoid a double standard that favors Google’s anti-consumer market conduct.
We urge the Administration to rethink this decision and demand more answers from Google about what data were collected, and how and why they were collected.
For more information, please visit www.theamericanconsumer.org or contact Steve at [email protected].