Posted by Christine Chen, Manager, Global Communications and Public Affairs

Online privacy has been on a lot of people's minds lately, including ours. As Google has grown, it's only natural that people have questions about how we handle information.

We've talked a lot in the past about providing our users with transparency and choice in some of our products, like the "off the record" feature in Google Talk or requesting that images be removed from Google Street View. But we haven't always done a good job of talking about Google's philosophical approach to privacy overall -- or sharing our strong belief in harnessing data to create products and services that are useful for our users.

So over the past several weeks, we've been spending time with policymakers, consumer advocates, think tanks, trade associations, and journalists to chat about Google's approach to privacy. As you can see from this presentation, we've talked about our guiding privacy principles, explained what search logs look like, and discussed how we use data to improve our products and services.

Google Privacy

We've also talked about three major privacy initiatives we've undertaken this past year that underscore our commitment to transparency and choice -- interest-based advertising, the data liberation front, and Google Dashboard. For 2010, we're looking forward to taking even more steps to help users protect their privacy.