Former FTC Employee Files Complaint Over Google Privacy
A former Federal Trade Commission employee has filed a complaint with the agency accusing Google Inc. of not adequately protecting the privacy of consumers' search queries. — The complaint was filed September 6 by Christopher Soghoian …
Context & Ripple Effects
The September 6 filing by Christopher Soghoian — a former FTC employee turned privacy researcher — is the third time since 2007 an outside party has formally asked the agency to police Google's data practices, following the 2007 privacy complaint and EPIC's 2009 request for an FTC investigation. What makes this one awkward for the agency is the filer's résumé: a former staffer knows exactly where the enforcement levers are.
The complaint lands on an FTC that has been turning up the heat all year. In March 2010 a commissioner publicly ripped into Google's privacy efforts, warning internet companies of tougher penalties, and separately the agency was already scrutinizing Google's power in search and advertising alongside the DOJ and European Commission. A complaint from inside the building gives that pressure a concrete case file.
First-order effects
- The FTC must now decide whether Soghoian's search-query complaint merits a formal investigation or dismissal — with the added optics of evaluating a charge brought by one of its own alumni.
- Google faces a third consumer-privacy grievance on file at its chief US regulator, each one narrowing the space between 'isolated complaint' and 'pattern of practice'.
Second-order effects
- Advocacy groups gain a template: filings by credentialed insiders cost nothing and force the agency to docket them, so expect copycat complaints targeting Google's other data streams.
- With the FTC having just cleared Google's AdMob acquisition on antitrust grounds in May 2010, privacy complaints give the agency a second, independent track to keep the company under review even where competition concerns fall away.
Third-order effects
- If the FTC keeps receiving and acting on complaint-driven cases, private petitions become a de facto enforcement channel for search-privacy rules that no legislation currently mandates.
- For Google, the structural risk is that search-query handling — the core input to its advertising model — gets reframed from a technical question into a recurring regulatory one.
The trend: Privacy enforcement against Google is shifting from episodic group petitions toward a steady drumbeat of individual complaints that keep the FTC's docket — and the company's data practices — permanently on the agenda.