Google drops off top 20 most trusted list

While Facebook voted in

16 December 2008 9:55 GMT / By Amy-Mae Elliott

Google has slipped from the top 20 most trusted companies for privacy list while Apple and Yahoo are included for the first time.

The stats come from the Ponemon Institute, a privacy and information security research company, and Trust-e, a privacy certification service, annual "Most Trusted Companies For Privacy" report that surveyed 6,486 US adult consumers.

In 2006 and 2007 Google ranked in the top 10, but over the last year has suffered from some high profile negative publicity over how long it keeps user's personal data for.

Google issued a statement in response to the news: "We work hard to earn and keep that trust with a long-standing commitment to protect to the privacy of our users' information. The bedrock of our privacy philosophy is to be transparent about our approach to privacy and to give users meaningful control, and we continue to work to put these principles into practice and improve user privacy".

Facebook was also a new name to the list this year, despite the well publicised controversy over its Beacon advertising and alert system that the company had to publicly apologise for.

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Software, Websites, Search engines, Google, Biz, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo