Silkie Carlo, director of privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch, said: ‘Google’s fun branding veils its frankly sinister surveillance machinery.
‘It is most people’s portal to the internet, their maps, emails and phones. But not many people know that the amount of information Google collects about them is just enormous.
‘It would be entirely possible to provide great services while protecting people’s privacy. But instead, Google harvests and centralises years of information on billions of people around the globe to exploit it for profit.
‘Should any company have that much power? The risks to individuals and to society at large are incredibly daunting.’