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Julian Assange as seen in 2013. 
(Photo: Xavier Granja Cedeño/Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores)

Google’s practices are “almost identical” to those of the U.S. National Security Agency and its British counterpart, the GCHQ, Julian Assange has said.

The WikiLeaks founder made the charge Thursday in interviews with the BBC and Sky News. He spoke from the Ecuadoran Embassy in London, where he has lived for over two years under political asylum.

“Google’s business model is to spy,” Assange told the BBC.

“It makes more than 80 percent of its money collecting information about people, pooling it together, storing it, indexing it, building profiles of people to predict their interests and behaviors and then selling those profiles principally to advertisers, but also to others.”

“The result is, in terms of how it works, its actual practice, is almost identical to the National Security Agency or GCHQ,” he said.

In similar comments to Sky News, Assange said, “Google has become, in its behavior, a privatized version of the NSA. It’s not that it’s doing things that are illegal. It’s not,” he said, explaining its profile-building practices.

“That is the same procedure that the National Security Agency or GCHQ goes through, and that’s why the National Security Agency has then latched on top of what Google is collecting.”