WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange made an alarming claim that internet search engine Google is working like an intelligence agency, collecting, storing and indexing the data of its users.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange made an alarming claim that internet search engine Google is working like an intelligence agency, collecting, storing and indexing the data of its users.

Speaking to BBC and Sky News, Assange compared Google to a “a privatized version of the NSA,” referring to the US National Security Agency which was revealed to have been spying on millions of people worldwide by whistleblower Edward Snowden last year.

“Google’s business model is the spy. It makes more than 80 percent of its money by collecting information about people, pooling it together, storing it, indexing it, building profiles of people to predict their interests and behavior, and then selling those profiles principally to advertisers, but also others,” Assange told the BBC.

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

Assange also went on to say that Google has been working with the NSA since 2002, and is included as part of the defense industrial base as of 2009.

“They have been engaged with the Prism system, where nearly all information collected by Google is available to the NSA,” Assange said, adding “at the institutional level, Google is deeply involved in US foreign policy.”

Assange, who has been trapped in London's Ecuadorian embassy since June 2012 after being granted asylum, risks being arrested immediately by British police who stand watch outside the embassy should he attempt to leave.