Making Sense of Google’s New Privacy Policy
As you may have heard, Google is updating it’s privacy policy on March 1st, 2012. So I thought I’d take a look at it and see just what’s changing, how it affects us, and what we can do (if anything).
Essentially what Google is doing is consolidating over 60 separate privacy policies into one which will cover all of their products.
The biggest issue that many people have with this new policy is that there is no way to opt-out of it. There are ways to opt-out of certain items yes, but for the basic privacy policy, Google has pretty much left the impression with users “if you don’t like it, don’t use Google”.
The bottom line is that Google has been tracking what you’ve been doing online for a very long time. Every time you used YouTube, Google Docs, Gmail, Blogger, etc., and signed into Google in order to use these services, Google has been keeping data on you. This might surprise you and if it does, you wouldn’t be alone. Just think of how often you opt-in to use any service not just Google’s and just automatically click the box to agree with a privacy policy without reading it?
Google’s new privacy policy really isn’t all that different from what they’ve been doing except that it takes it a bit of a step further. In essence, if you view a video on YouTube while signed into Google, the video that you viewed may be shared across other Google platforms such as Google+ for example.
If I had to put it all in a nutshell it would be this: Google wants to identify you, as a single user, and track everything you do across all of their properties so that they can better gear their advertising towards you.
Essentially, the information they’re collecting about you is:
- The information you provide to them; name, email, telephone number, credit card, etc.
- The services that you use and how you use them.
- Information about your devices such as computers and mobile phones (including your mobile phone number).
- They’ll log information such as the phone number of who called you, how long the call was and the type of call that it was.
- And a lot of other things…
So what CAN you opt-out of? And what exactly does Google know about you right now? Well, the first thing you can do is visit the dashboard and see all of the services you use within Google as well as what Google knows about you.
Next, you can visit the tools page and opt-out of some of the services you don’t want Google tracking you on.
Within this tools page there’s an ads preferences manager which will give you an overview of who Google believes that you are – for instance, they think I’m a 35-44 year old Male because of the sites I visit. Evidently, lots of us gals in technology are being referred to as “males”. Is Google stereotyping? LOL!!! I digress…
Now, if you so desire to just simply quit using Google all together before this new privacy policy goes into effect on March 1st, you can visit http://www.dataliberation.org/. What this service will do is let you download and move all of the data you currently have on Google to a new location.
And if you do want to close your Google account, then visit these instructions.
Remember, the new rules won’t go into affect until March 1st, 2012 so you’ve got a little bit of time to make up your mind as to what to do.
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