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.
Convert Your Website to Mobile and Make it Mobile Friendly
It is estimated that by the end of 2012, 23% of the population will be using Smartphones and those users will expect the websites they visit to be mobile friendly, easy to read and easy to use.
If you’re one of those who has yet to convert your website over to a user-friendly format, I’ve got some good news for you. It’s very easy with just a few clicks of your mouse or even an install of a of a WordPress plugin can instantly make your website mobile friendly.
First, let’s take a look at some WordPress plugins for just this purpose:
One of my favorites is WPTouch.
- You don’t have to do anything fancy to your blog in order for it to work.
- Works on iPhones, iPod Touches, Androids, Palm and BlackBerry OS6 devices.
- You can customize the appearance.
- It won’t affect the way your site currently looks.
There are also:
If you want to turn your static website into a mobile friendly site, there’s a little bit of work involved but probably not as much as you might think.
As a matter of fact, Google offers a lot of help in this process. They offer a free “10 Mobile Site Best Practices“, and offer a complete step by step process to creating your very own mobile site here. If you’re curious as to what your current site looks like right now to a mobile phone user, use this testing tool.
There is no doubt that as a society, we are all moving towards becoming a far more mobile society. And it’s more important than ever to make sure that you’re getting traffic from all possible angles.
Google’s Love / Hate Relationship With Affiliate Marketers
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Programs, Google, Internet Marketing, seo
This fantastic infographic provided by SEOBook, shows how Google’s attitude towards affiliates has changed over the years. First, they loved you because you bought PPC traffic, then when that traffic began to get noticed by big companies, they started a slow but steady campaign to oust most affiliates from their PPC network; even going as far as to ban many affiliates.
At first you would think that it may be the affiliates problem right? They should have known that their ads would get banned. Not so fast…whenever you delete or pause a PPC ad in Google, no matter how old it is, it still remains in your account. Many affiliates were banned because these old, outdated ads, which may have been deleted or paused, were at the time completely within Google’s terms and conditions; however, because they currently don’t adhere to the rules, they were banned, some for life.
Essentially, Google had them by the throat. They ran completely legitimate ads in Google say in 2005, decided that they didn’t want to run that ad anymore for whatever reason, deleted it, (although still contained within the account, thus, not truly deleted), and then had their account banned because it didn’t adhere with Google’s current terms and conditions.
Can you see the problem here?
Over the years, affiliates have been taking some pretty big hits by Google; either getting their sites pushed down in the search results, or whatever the case may be.
Ironically, during this short amount of time, Google has opened up their own affiliate network. Which leads one to wonder if these same sites were to promote products from Google’s affiliate network, would it make a difference in rankings? I haven’t tested this but would sure be curious to hear of anyone who has.
So, all this rant out of the way, here’s the infographic I was telling you about…
