14 DAY TRIAL // Consumer Watchdog, an advocacy group with a 'soft spot' for Google, has pulled off another stunt that clearly generated the amount of attention it wanted. But the attention was more on what the group was doing rather than the issue it's trying to highlight.
The group has created a cartoon video depicting Google CEO Eric Schmidt as an evil ice cream man bent on knowing everyone secrets. And on doing full body scans of little children.
The idea is, apparently, to highlight the privacy issues Google has and to criticise some of the comments Schmidt has made on the issue.
More specifically, the group wants to push for the creation of a "Do Not Track Me" list which people would join if they didn't want Google, or anyone else, to keep track of their usage.
The video itself doesn't touch on that though, perhaps because it would need to explain to users what exactly Google does and what the group is trying to achieve. But depicting Schmidt as a crazed ice cream man clearly has more impact.
Google, which has just updated its privacy policy, enables users to opt out of behavioral targeting, disable search history and even block Analytics from keeping track of them. Google has created its own browser add-on to block Analytics on any site. So the group is pretty much asking for something that already exists.
But Consumer Watchdog has a message and it needs to be herd. So, after posting the 'evil Google' video, on Google's YouTube obviously, it also ran a portion of it several times in Times Square. A great way to spend its backers' money, to be sure.
And things get even more interesting. While the group's makes it a case of going after Google for Analytics, guess what the Consumer Watchdog site is using to track its users? None other than Google Analytics, as Business Insider points out, unsurprisingly since the free Google tool is one the most popular of its kind.
Still, at least the Consumer Watchdog Inside Google website, dedicated to Google obviously, doesn't use Analytics. It does, however, use Piwik an open-source Analytics alternative.