than Google, but they have always been upfront about it from Day One.
Soon after Yahoo! was established, I visited their website and read their Privacy Policy (privacy policies were the latest fashionable practice at the time, so to speak). It did not mince words, and basically said that as far as they were concerned, no one was entitled to any privacy at all, and they would act accordingly.
I never went back to Yahoo!, except once to join a group which has never been all that active. If I had realized that it was a Yahoo! group before I sought out the group, I would not have bothered.
Google started out with a policy that actually did express respect for privacy, and I quoted from it in a post on this blog at the time, although I cannot recall the specific article.
Reading the same page relatively recently, well, they were no longer so definitive and the link for the "Opt Out" button was broken.
Google's privacy policy is far more significant than the one for Yahoo! or even for Microsoft, because Google has so many more ways and means to acquire and to associate the data that they collect on the millions of people who use Google services directly, and do business with Google subsidiaries. The scope of their reach is such that it is difficult to find a web site of any significance which does not have Google somewhere on its pages.
Be that as it may, Google just doesn't have much, if any, credibility left with regard to whether they respect anyone's privacy. That much is clear from reading the posts here and on the other article about Google Chrome (
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/security/?p=3738&tag=content;leftCol).
Facebook has become another giant which is facing its own day of reckoning. I have closed my Facebook account simply because all of the measures that I had to take to safeguard my privacy kept changing, and not for the better. Using them consumed so much time and energy, both to discover and to use, that the benefits that I received from having and using the account to "socialize" just were not worth it.
