Concerning privacy, Google has come across a few difficulties. The company's mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Sticking with that mission while guarding your privacy needs can leave Google with a few decisions to make.
"Our mission statement inherently leads to privacy being an issue for us, and we want to acknowledge that" said Mike Yang, managing product counsel for Google. "The underlying rationale for most companies is to keep the minimum amount of data on hand about its users, but our company's business model relies on data."
Google makes money by collecting mounds of data from and about users, and putting it to work by providing better products and ads that users are more likely to click on. So if all Google users prevented the company from logging their information, the search engine would be useless and the company wouldn't make money.
The conflict came to a head in recent weeks after Google launched Google Buzz, its social networking foray. A confusing one-two punch in Buzz's default settings automatically followed Gmail users' most e-mailed contacts and then posted those contacts publicly after a user "buzzed" about something.
After a public uproar, Google made a fix to Buzz's defaults within two days of its launch that largely satisfied the concerns of users and organizations dedicated to information privacy. But the wonky controls led some to wonder if Google's interests lay more with making money than with ensuring users' privacy.