Google revising privacy policies, data use

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Google said it is revising its privacy policies and changing how it uses data from users of its services to provide more personalized search results and advertisements.

Google said it is revising its privacy policies and changing how it uses data from users of its services to provide more personalized search results and advertisements.

The Mountain View, California-based Internet giant said the changes are designed to improve the user experience across the various Google products, which range from Web search to Gmail to Google+ to YouTube.

Google said it is combining more than 60 privacy policies for its various services into a single policy that will take effect from March 1.

"We're rolling out a new main privacy policy that covers the majority of our products and explains what information we collect, and how we use it, in a much more readable way," Alma Whitten, Google's director of privacy, product and engineering, said in a blog post.

"We believe this new, simpler policy will make it easier for people to understand our privacy practices as well as enable Google to improve the services we offer," she said.

Google noted that "regulators globally have been calling for shorter, simpler privacy policies" and said it would inform users of the changes by email and with a notice on the Google.com home page.

Google has found itself under increasing scrutiny from European and US regulators as it has grown from a scrappy startup into an Internet titan, branching out into various businesses including online mapping, shopping and travel and providing software for mobile phones and tablet computers.

The changes to Google's privacy policies are certain to draw further attention in Washington and Brussels and announcing them more than a month ahead of time appeared to be a bid to provide time for them to be digested.

Whitten said instead of having terms of service for individual products, Google was revising its terms of service to cover numerous products.

The sign-in page of social networking site Google+ is seen in Washington in August 2011. Google has found itself under increasing scrutiny from European and US regulators as it has grown from a scrappy startup into an Internet titan, branching out into various businesses including online mapping, shopping and travel and providing software for mobile phones and tablet computers.

Google account users will have to accept the new terms of service to continue using their accounts.

The main change announced Tuesday involves users who have Google accounts.

"If you're signed in, we may combine information you've provided from one service with information from other services," Whitten said.

"In short, we'll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience," Whitten said.

By linking services and sharing information "we can make search better -- figuring out what you really mean when you type in Apple, Jaguar or Pink," she said. "We can provide more relevant ads too.

"We can provide reminders that you're going to be late for a meeting based on your location, your calendar and an understanding of what the traffic is like that day," she said.

Merging the information about its users appears to be a bid by Google to glean a more integrated view of its users, an advantage enjoyed by Apple and Facebook.

"Companies everywhere want to break down product walls to get a 360 degree view of customers," said Larry Dignan of technology site ZDNet.

"Unified user experience aside, it was kind of nice to have my YouTube personas different from say, Gmail and Google+" Dignan said.

"Google will know more about you than your wife does," he said. "Everything across your screens will be integrated and tracked.

Dignan said the move appears to be partly aimed at "juicing Google+" the Facebook rival launched by Google last year.

In March of last year, the US Federal Trade Commission reached a settlement with Google over Google Buzz, the social networking tool which was launched in February 2010 that spawned a slew of privacy complaints.

Under the settlement announced by the US regulator, Google is required to implement a comprehensive privacy program and will be subject to independent privacy audits every two years for the next 20 years.

The FTC also an ongoing probe into Google's lucrative search and advertising business. Google has said it is cooperating with the FTC investigation.


http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-01-goog...icies.html


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Time to find another e-mail service, and delete everything in my Gmail accounts. Any suggestions of good services that respect your privacy? One(s) not based in the US, and in a country that won't submit to the ACTA law?

If you are so concerned about your privacy, what are you doing communicating on the internet in the first place?

The simple fact of the matter is that no matter what the privacy policies of any given service provider, the information that you put out there is readily available to anyone who really wants to find it. So rather than worrying about Google bombarding you with targeted ads and search results (let's face it, Google's interest is ad revenue), why not just accept that agencies like NSA, GCHQ and CSCE can read everything that you put onto the internet, and your privacy is illusory at best.

After that, govern your posting and email behaviour accordingly.

I myself. fear more from the NSA and other government agencys than google. It does tick me off that google would stockpile this info, Abuse can and will happen in the future

I think you are quite correct. And I also think that it is impossible to put the genie back in the bottle. So your best remedy is to decide how much or how little information you want to put out there, regardless of what so-called privacy protections websites, portals and service providers claim to offer.

This makes no real difference to the data they collect. If you have an account with them, Google already have this information about you, and they already use it across different services - if I log into GMail, then go to YouTube, I can hit the login button and go straight to my YouTube account without entering a username and password, and the same goes for all Google owned sites. Google also targets ads at me based on things I've said on other Google services and websites with AdSense on them.

All this is doing is telling people that Google will now start using more of the data they already have across more of their services. If this worries you, then you've probably already got too much data stored with Google anyway.

Facts are these: First, GMail is, IMHO at least, the best e-mail service. I don't think anything beats it in terms of UI, reliability, and security. Second, all e-mail providers, unless they start charging for e-mail services, will be making money by collecting data on you and using it for advertising. Google is not alone in this.

Personally, I think Google is generally quite good with how they handle customer data, no doubt due to the scrutiny various privacy regulators are putting them under. I certainly trust them a lot more than Facebook. They only slip up on this occasionally, and sometimes I do think they go too far - for example, they've recently been trying to force people onto Google+ - but generally speaking they're one of the good guys.