As part of the effort, it will adhere to “do not track” requests from individuals when serving up adverts from its own DoubleClick network, said a person familiar with the plans, a move that would make it the first big online advertising company to limit itself voluntarily in this way.
Google’s race to regain the high ground came after its latest admission to a devastating privacy glitch. The slip-up was uncovered by a researcher at Stanford University, who discovered that the company had secretly overridden a block in Apple’s Safari browser that was meant to bar illicit tracking by advertisers.
Google had circumvented the default setting in Safari that is meant to prevent advertisers from planting “cookies” in the browser, according to Jonathan Mayer, a graduate student at the university. Cookies are short pieces of code that gather information about the websites users visit and report the information back to the companies that planted them.
The search company quickly admitted to the unapproved data collection, but described its action as inadvertent and the byproduct of an effort to let Safari users connect to services like its Google+ social network while browsing other pages on the web.
“We didn’t anticipate that this would happen, and we have now started removing these advertising cookies from Safari browsers,” Google said.
The claim that it had collected information by mistake echoed its defense two years ago after cars used to photograph streets for its Street View service were found to have collected information from personal WiFi networks. That led to investigations by privacy agencies around the world.
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