The Google-Yahoo Deal and the Privacy of End-Users
September 20th, 2008Google is publicly defending the Google-Yahoo Deal on its Public Policy Blog. This specific Q&A struck me as possibly misleading and revealing at the same time:
Question: Will Google benefit from access to Yahoo!’s user data?
Answer: No. We have taken steps in the Yahoo! agreement to make sure that neither company has access to personally identifiable user information from the other company.
What is this supposed to mean? To answer this question, one has to know what Google considers to be personally identifiable information (pii). I would love to hear some clarification from Google here. In the past Google has stated it considers user logs of non-authenticated users to be non-pii. Its privacy policy is constructed in a way that allows the legal defence to be made that server logs are non-pii. So the question remains, what data do they share? Since the statement specifically refers to the term personally identifiable information (and the statement must have passed Google lawyers) I place my bet that the deal gives Google access to Yahoo search data. That would make Google (Search, AdSense Network, Analytics, etc…) + DoubleClick + Yahoo. Of course, I would love to hear that I am wrong.