Google Inc. recently announced that it will be making sweeping changes to its privacy policies effective March 1. The technology giant claims the purpose of the new policy is to ease the use of its many products like its search engine, Gmail, YouTube and Google Calendar. All of these products will now be housed under one umbrella privacy policy, which will allow you to connect all of these products under one Google account, making your internet use faster, more efficient and tailor-made for your preferences.
While this all sounds useful, there are some major issues with the new policy.
Numerous internet and privacy watchdog groups are up in arms over the new privacy policy. In fact, the implications of it are so far-reaching that the European Union has asked Google to delay their application of the new policy so that their authorities can further investigate whether it will break European privacy laws.
To Google’s credit, the company has been relatively upfront and transparent about the new privacy policy, posting it on all their platform sites and providing a prompt to remind users to read the policy in its entirety, thus working to explain its features and lay out the benefits to the everyday internet user with a Google account. Google is trying to sell the policy as if it is going to reorganize and streamline all or most internet activity.
Why all the kerfuffle over this new privacy policy if it is meant to help Internet users?
Understandably, the intricacy of the changes can be pretty confusing to the average person who just wants to check their email and watch funny clips on YouTube. So to help our readers understand these new privacy policies, here are several key points right off of Google’s website, broken down.
Google: “We believe transparency and choice are the foundations of privacy.”
Google here is trying to connect with their users, explaining the privacy policy openly so as to not upset people with its new changes.
Google: “We’ll ask for personal information, like your name, email address, telephone number or credit card. If you want to take full advantage of the sharing features we offer, we might also ask you to create a publicly visible Google Profile, which may include your name and photo.”
This is Google’s push for its social network site Google +, attempting to bring people in because of the link from more common sites like Gmail and YouTube which will now streamline all of a user’s information.
Google: “When you use our services or view content provided by Google, we may automatically collect and store certain information in server logs. This may include: telephony [sic] log information like your phone number, calling-party number, forwarding numbers, time and date of calls, duration of calls, SMS routing information and types of calls.”
Google, which is making a push for its software through the Droid line of smart phones, will now record call information just like a cellular company in phones that use Google software.
Google: “When you use a location-enabled Google service, we may collect and process information about your actual location, like GPS signals sent by a mobile device. We may also use various technologies to determine location, such as sensor data from your device that may, for example, provide information on nearby Wi-Fi access points and cell towers.”
This will now allow Google to record location information if you use something like Google Maps on your phone. It will enable Google to form an idea of where you spend your time, which ultimately will allow them to show ads relevant to you making them a valuable asset in the advertising industry.
The driving force behind Google’s new privacy policy is the streamlining of all the information coming in from their empire of products and programs. They can thus assign all this information to a single user. With this intricate knowledge of users’ daily lives, Google will then be able to sell much more advertising, similar to how Facebook uses users’ info to advertise products.
In other words, Google has taken all of the things you do on the internet and housed them under one big privacy policy. Google will now be able to record our lives so they can advertise in ways never before possible. It is the ultimate realization of the corporate American dream.
Say you don’t want Google to give you ads based on keywords from emails from your Gmail account. Or maybe you don’t want ads on your work computer based on the things you search for on the internet at home. Instead of allowing users to separate their various Google services and identities, or instead of providing the ability turn off personalized search results, Google has come up with a seemingly simpler but in reality more difficult solution: delete your Google account.
In today’s world information is money, and when it comes to electronic information, Google is king. With this new privacy policy, Google will be able to track its users’ every move. •
Google may be upfront about the new privacy policy but they are far from being transparent about what it means to the average user. There’s a myriad of “Google Gotcha’s” (just “Google it’ to read them) buried in the policy. Their new “privacy” policy does not fully inform the public nor does it ask us fairly which is what this petition on Change.org http://chn.ge/x6A8ca is asking Google to do. Starting March 1st, either we agree across all their products to basically sign our privacy away or we can’t use even one of them. More importantly though, if this new policy goes through, Google, who holds tons of our sensitive private information, does NOT protect our privacy and they should.
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