Poll Tacks

As Britain goes to the polls the giant search engine company Google is publicizing the Google UK School Election, which promises to promote civic values and provide lesson plans to fulfill curricular standards, all while promoting its brand with primary and secondary school students.

Although the ballot box is generally thought of as a private space for exercising one's personal political conscience, clicking on Google's "privacy policy" shows a very different ethos.

We have 5 privacy principles that describe how we approach privacy and user information across all of our products:

1. Use information to provide our users with valuable products and services.
2. Develop products that reflect strong privacy standards and practices.
3. Make the collection of personal information transparent.
4. Give users meaningful choices to protect their privacy.
5. Be a responsible steward of the information we hold.

This Privacy Center was created to provide you with easy-to-understand information about our products and policies to help you make more informed choices about which products you use, how to use them, and what information you provide to us.

Although the company promotes visits to its supposedly independent Data Liberation site, one is not likely to find that actual cookie removal tools that the EFF recommends for anonymous Google use.