Russia's Federal Antimonopoly Service will investigate whether Google is engaging in unfair competition via its e-mail service, Gmail. According to State Duma deputy, Ilya Kostunov, the FAS investigation has been triggered by user complaints that Google violates the privacy of correspondence of Russian citizens, through tracking software that allows for targeted advertising and marketing. Kostunov said that although other internet providers collect information on users, they do not read private correspondence. Sergey Kopylov, the head of the legal department for the "Internet Technical Center" questions whether Google's practices also violate Article 138 of the Criminal Code which makes it a crime to invade "the secrecy of correspondence, telephone conversations, postal, telegraph and other messages." Natalya Kaspersky, an information security officer for InfoWatch, admits that Google may be invading users' privacy, but she cautions that no user is forced to use Gmail or other Google services. Google offers free services, that people voluntarily choose to use, and the more services a person chooses to "opt into", the less privacy a person can expect, says Kaspersky. The Russian office of Google indirectly confirmed that Gmail software analyzes email content, but said that it no person ever reads email content; rather, an automatic algorithm determines from the email content which ads to show to which users.
http://izvestia.ru/news/546438#ixzz2Nuuamyqi
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment