Ever since Google  blogged on Jan 24^th that it was updating its privacy policy ro provide its users with a more “intuitive experience,” a big buzzword of 2012 is now “privacy.”  In some respects, it was being more upfront about the fact that it will use “the information it knows about people [to] use it across all of its services.” When the press cried foul play, Google immediately defended its update by stating: “this is something we have already been doing for a long time,” but now with more transparency, “choice and control.”

Google is the Internet’s largest and most popular search engine, so it will always receive an immense amount of scrutiny for its information sharing practices. But what do we do about the infinite number of other online services – most of which have privacy policies that its users likely never look at? Rather than produce truly honest privacy policies, Companies use these policies as “liability shields” for information sharing practices. Thus, search engines like Skipity are inhibited from producing a “refreshingly honest example of the privacy policy most companies’ execs would like to implement, but don’t dare too.” This almost-policy still exists, ironically stating: ”‘we care about profiteering and violating it when expedient or useful,’” including “selling any of your data that it wants to any and all corporate customers, sending you limitless spam, tracking your movements via GPS if possible, watching you through your webcam, and implanting a chip in your body that is subject to reinstallation whenever the company chooses.”

Where is the balance? How do we find an optimal and transparent solution for better online privacy protection that would both benefit web users and online services?

The PriView project is trying to answer this conundrum by making an easy-to-use crowd-sourced tool in which users could easily understand the information practices they consent to every time they land on a new domain, and how the information they provide is processed. Users can work together to track the trackers by downloading the PriView plug-in in order to digest these privacy policies by interacting with them through PriView’s PPRS scheme, determining for everyone just how readable and honest these “liability shields” actually are.