In a report due out today eBay joins the BBC and Wikipedia as some of the best companies in watchdog group Privacy International‘s latest report. They are rated as “generally privacy-aware” along with Last.fm and LiveJournal, although this isn’t the top grade available which no company attained.
Google were alone in being awarded the worst possible grade given to companies with “comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility to privacy.” None of the other twenty-two companies in the survey which included both Yahoo and Microsoft sunk that low. According to Privacy International, Google has already embarked on a smear campaign to discredit and the report and the group.
Google is already under pressure to tighten up on privacy matters in the US and Europe and has recently agreed to only keep search information for two years. The latest report suggests that they still have a long way to go in this area. eBay however recently updated their privacy policy and it seems their efforts meet with approval, at least from Privacy International.
