Rating Tech Giants On Privacy: Google Slips, Whatsapp Fails

[Guest]

Edward Snowden became a household name, technology companies are competing like never before for privacy bragging rights. In that race, Google may have just dropped out of the lead group. And WhatsApp face planted at the starting line.Google’s rating still vastly outperforms the lowest performers in the study—WhatsApp, AT&T and Verizon. But given Google’s past leadership in fighting government data requests and the enormous cache of information the company collects on its users, the company’s behavior is “disappointing,” says EFF staff attorney Nate Cardozo, who worked on the study.

[smita89]

Google had a perfect score in 2014, and some of the best scores in the tech industry for the three earlier years in which the EFF issued its report.

[Priyanka]

The web giant no longer tells users the full extent of its data retention, a lack of transparency that the EFF says has grown as Google has launched more products and services.

[Daljeet]

Twitter, which also has had perfect scores in some previous EFF ratings, lost a star in the latest report for the same expired gag order issue. But Apple and Dropbox both met the EFF’s standards and earned perfect scores. Neither Google nor Twitter responded to WIRED’s request for comment.

[neharani]

Electronic Frontier Foundation’s annual “Who’s Got Your Back” privacy scorecard that rates companies’ protection of their users’ data from government surveillance and censorship, Google slipped for the first time, receiving only three stars out of five in the civil liberties group’s ratings.