Google Gets Top Marks For Protecting User Privacy, Apple Lags Far Behin

Google Gets Top Marks For Protecting User Privacy, Apple Lags Far Behin: reat deal of interest in how your online privacy is managed.   | Timothy Koppe

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EFF Privacy Ranking Chart

If you use the Internet-and lets be honest, we live in a wired (or wireless!) world-then you should have a great deal of interest in how your online privacy is managed. One thing most users don't think about (I know I didn't for a while) is, despite whatever draconian methods we might take to protect our online lives, how well does the company that owns those services protect our privacy?

Thanks to the information collected from the Electronic Frontier Foundation now we have an answer. According to the EFF's most recent report card, Google has ranked as one of the companies when it comes to how hard they try to protect the privacy of their users.

According to the report, Google received starts inn the following categories:
- Requiring a warrant to release user content
- Publishing transparency reports
- Publishing law enforcement guidelines
- Fighting for user privacy rights in court
- Fighting for user privacy rights in Congress

The only category that Google didn't receive a star in was telling users about government data requests.

By comparison, Apple Inc. received one of the EFF's worse marks, receiving stars in no category except fighting for user rights in Congress-which, frankly, isn't that hard to do with all the lobbying that goes on in the current Congress.

Despite its high grades, Google was not the top of the class, with Twitter and Sonic.net receiving stars in every category. Apple can feel thankful it won't be alone in study hall-Verizon and MySpace, received stars at all.