Google ‘Search plus Your World’ attracting attention of privacy and antitrust advocates

There is a possibility that Google’s “Search, plus Your World” may be examined by the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) if a privacy group decides to file a complaint.  EPIC (the Electronic Privacy Information Center) is trying to decide whether they will attack Google.

This is the same group that filed a previous privacy complaint against Google Buzz.  This resulted in a court order for Google to submit to privacy audits for the next 20 years.

Google’s “Search plus Your World” when linked to Google Social Search, Google+, Picassa and other searches can piece together a pretty impressive collection of what people are doing across social networking sites.  It also gathers information from people you follow in addition to other sites that share common subject matter with your items.

Twitter and Facebook have blocked Google’s access to their data for searches as there were issues of Twitter and Facebook getting lees priority than Google in their search results.

On the anti-trust issues, several sites have complained that Google assigns its own content with higher scores than the content of others.  This leads to Google effectively making sure the competition gets held back.

Privacy issues will be more difficult to prove.  Google keeps users’ data separate and when the user sees the combination of all their data it is sent over an encrypted link though https.

Users can individually opt out of accessing personalized search results; they cannot opt out of having the information found on Google.  So I have to ask, what good is that?

Do you think Google is violating your own personal privacy?  If so, we would like to have you post some examples in the comments section.

Maybe we can get a movement started here.