Google has made a minor change to its homepage, adding a link that leads to the company's Privacy Center Web page.
Google's decision, noted on Thursday afternoon in the company's corporate blog and a public-policy blog, is an apparently successful attempt to quell controversy over the posting of its privacy policy.
Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the US Electronic Privacy Information Center (Epic), said on Saturday that his group is "pleased" with the decision.
"This was not only required by California law (and Google is a California corporation) but is also the standard practice for commercial websites," he wrote in an email.
Epic had joined with the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and the World Privacy Forum in leading the effort to press Google to make the change.
Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, also welcomed Google's decision.
"Although privacy policies are not a guarantee of perfect privacy practices, they are still an important tool for consumers," she said on Saturday in an email. Dixon added that such links are "something consumers have come to expect and rightly so, given that it is a standard practice".
The timing of Google's announcement — on the afternoon before a long holiday weekend in the US — may have appeared suspicious to some. But Rotenberg noted that his group "helped draw attention to the 30-day time limit in the California law following notice. We literally counted to 30 after sending the letter. Day 31 arrived and Google posted the link."
Saul Hansell, a reporter with The New York Times, first brought the issue to light in May when he asked whether the company was violating California law by not posting a link to its privacy policy on its homepage.
Privacy advocates soon got involved, sending Google a formal letter on 3 June. Google had maintained that it was doing nothing unlawful.
Google competitors Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and Ask.com all provide links to their privacy policies on their homepages.
Google vice president Marissa Mayer noted in the corporate blog that Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin required the famously sparse homepage to remain clean at 28 words, even with the change. Thus, the company removed the word "Google" from the copyright line and replaced it with "Privacy".
