Politech: Is anti-Google California senator a privacy hypocrite? [priv]

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

Liz Figueroa is a Democratic state senator from Fremont, a Silicon 
Valley town just across the bay from Google's headquarters in Mountain 
View. She doesn't like Google's Gmail much at all, saying that its 
ad-supported free email feature violates customers' "expectation of 
privacy." See her press release:
http://democrats.sen.ca.gov/servlet/gov.ca.senate.democrats.pub.members.memDisplayPress?district=sd10&ID=2087

But if you take Figueroa's complaints on their own terms, she may be 
more guilty of violating Internet users' privacy than Google.
Figueroa's web site solicits feedback in a form that asks for personal 
information including home address and email address -- but it includes 
no privacy policy:
http://democrats.sen.ca.gov/senator/figueroa/

So she and her staff can do whatever they want with the information and 
other data, such as IP address, available through the server's web logs. 
Gmail, on the other hand, is a far better Internet citizen: it has a 
detailed privacy policy and terms of service agreement specifying what 
Google can and can't do:
http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/privacy.html
http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/terms_of_use.html

Figueroa happens to be the same politician that US PIRG calls a "privacy 
champion," and that Privacy Rights Clearinghouse has "commended":
http://www.pirg.org/consumer/pdfs/fcrarelease30sept.pdf
http://www.privacyrights.org/ar/outsourcing-privacy.htm

These same pro-regulatory activists have denounced companies for not 
having adequate privacy policies. A report from Privacy Rights 
Clearinghouse complains that one-third of commercial websites "post no 
privacy policies at all," a supposedly "dismal" finding:
http://www.privacyrights.org/ar/emperor.htm

Anyone think Privacy Rights Clearinghouse will denounce Figueroa too?

At the federal level, Figueroa's conduct would be verboten. A 2000 OMB 
policy requires all federal agencies to publish clear privacy policies 
on their web sites and comply with them:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/memoranda/m00-13.html

Perhaps Figueroa will say in her defense that nobody is forcing people 
to use her web site; it is entirely voluntary. That would be true. But 
of course the same thing can be said about Google and Gmail too.
-Declan

PS: Google is considering changes to Gmail:
http://news.com.com/2100-1024_3-5191028.html?tag=nefd.top
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