To appease privacy advocates, Google has added a privacy-policy link to its home page. Google had previously said it didn't want to clutter its page.
Led by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), several privacy groups, including the California-based Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, the World Privacy Forum, Consumer Action, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ACLU of Northern California, and the Consumer Federation of California, sent a letter to the search-engine giant on June 3. The letter notified Google it was in violation of California law for not posting the link.
Down To the Wire
The groups cited the California Online Privacy Protection Act of 2003. That law requires commercial Web-site operators who collect personal information to link to a privacy policy from the home page. They went so far as to mock up a Google home page with the privacy link.
"We felt that Google not only violated California law -- and keep in mind that Google is a California corporation -- but that Google was also violating standard practice for all Internet companies by not posting a link to the privacy policy on the home page," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of EPIC.
California law dictates that after a company has been notified of its failure to comply, it has 30 days to respond or legal action can be taken.
"We literally started counting down the 30 days on our home page. It got up to day 30 and Google didn't have a privacy link. But later that day, July 3, Google put it up," Rotenberg said. "So by day 31 there was a privacy link on the Google home page, which from their perspective is good timing."
Google's Side of the Story
Marissa Mayer, a Google vice president, said the company values its users' privacy. Trust, she said, is the basis of everything Google does...

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