A Race to the Bottom - Privacy Ranking of Internet Service Companies

Privacy International
September 6, 2007

PI has tracked the development of the Internet since the creation of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s. We have continually voiced our concern that this medium provides the potential for a haemorrhage of personal privacy, and we have argued for some years that Internet companies should embrace a wider range of privacy protections for users.

The privacy threat on the Internet arises from a number of factors. Increasing disclosure by consumers of personal information allows companies to capture and process data to a significant extent. New technologies permit the capture of increasingly detailed levels of information. Meanwhile, new Internet products often involve a requirement for user registration, enabling of identifying techniques and agreement to terms and conditions that are frequently hostile to privacy.

However the emergence over the past three years of an aggressive move by major Internet companies into "ad space" has created the most recent and possibly most dangerous threat to privacy.