Google slips on privacy rankings in EFF’s annual “Who’s Got Your Back” survey

Two years after Edward Snowden became a household name, technology companies are engaging like never before in one-upmanship over privacy rights.

In the current The Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF) annual ''Who's Got Your Back'' privacy scorecard, Google has slipped, while WhatsApp is reported to have the worst rating.

The EFF's annual ''Who's Got Your Back'' privacy scorecard scores  protection of their users' data by companies from government surveillance and censorship.

Google slipped in the ratings for the first time, getting only three stars out of five. The search giant had a perfect score in 2014, and some of the best scores in the tech industry for the three earlier years in which the EFF issued its report.

However, Google still outperformed the laggards in the study - WhatsApp, AT&T and Verizon, though given Google's past leadership in fighting government data requests and the enormous cache of information, the company's behaviour was ''disappointing,'' according to EFF staff attorney Nate Cardozo, who worked on the study.

''We feel confident that companies can always be doing more, and we like to reward companies for leading the pack,'' says Cardozo. In at least two categories of privacy protection, ''Google's no longer there.''

The report assessed companies on the basis of factors including their transparency to consumers about data requests and data retention, as also their public positions on so-called back doors that gave government agencies access to customer data.

Apple, Adobe, Yahoo, Dropbox and Sonic.net were among the high scorers while AT&T and WhatsApp, earned the lowest marks, with one out of five stars.

Verizon Communications, earned two stars in the report, down from four stars last year when the report had slightly different criteria.

The wide-ranging nature of government surveillance programmes, many of which had been revealed in documents leaked by Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, had forced tech companies to adopt a more proactive approach towards sharing their data collection and disclosure practices.

Most tech companies had published transparency reports detailing the number of requests received from government agencies, while also describing the types of data they collected and shared.

A number of big tech companies, including Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft, had called on President Barack Obama to reject policies aimed at weakening encryption technologies that protected internet communications.

The EFF report concluded that the tech sector's data practices were broadly improving.