Google is safe. It’s reliable. Many of us use it everyday, and even on our cell phones to look up song lyrics, the answer to a question, or more about that awesome restaurant we went to the other week that we forgot the name of. But, what would you think if Google were to bypass your privacy settings on your mobile device to track your personal web browsing habits?
The reality is, Google is guilty for doing just that. The article, “Google’s iPhone Tracking” published in The Wall Street Journal, discusses the implications of Google using a computer code that essentially tricked Apple’s Safari Web-browsing software into monitoring iPhone users’ browsing behaviors for advertising purposes. After being contacted by The Wall Street Journal, Google deactivated their code.
In a statement released by Google, they rebutted: “The Journal mischaracterizes what happened and why. We used known Safari functionality to provide features that signed-in Google users had enabled. It’s important to stress that these advertising cookies do not collect personal information.”
Personal privacy is a hot topic that many Internet users struggle to grasp. The browsers and websites that we love and trust (like Google) are betraying its users and monitoring our iPhones. I strongly believe that our cell phones should be a safe zone and not secretly regulated to gather information. Will I stop using Google and my iPhone Safari browser all together? Probably not. But as a consumer, I am starting to lose trust in the brand. If Google users have similar feelings, Google’s overall credibility will decrease and they may even lose customers and business. What do you think about personal privacy? Google users, is it time to make the switch to Bing?