Around the time Google introduced their social offering called Google+, they started an exercise of bring together all their products and services. They started with redesigning all their products to bring in visual uniformity. They also introduced Google+ integration in YouTube, Gmail, Google Reader and more.
Now it has brought about a convergence of 60 different privacy policy into a singe one. Well on the surface it looks a lot better for Google users, as a single privacy policy can actually be read and understood and not reading through several ones.
But it has also raised some questions on what happens to the data and how Google will deal with it.
You can check the old privacy policy here and compare it with the new single privacy policy.
What could be the advantages for Google?
Google will also integrate all the data, users have across all their products and services. This could be something that it already does through various privacy policies, but now will do it through a single one.
Users might not like the idea of their data being integrated from various other services, but it will probably give Google better way to serve up relative advertisements.
I think most people would be fine with this data being integrated, except with Gmail. People already do not like the idea of advertisements being served up on Gmail. If they see their data from Gmail being used to serve up advertisements on their search results, it might cause some criticisms of Google.
Here is a video explaining their single privacy policy
Do drop in your comments.
(via Google Blog)
3 Comments
Using Google’s services but expecting complete privacy is like going shopping at Walmart but insisting that none of their video cameras ever record your face.
What’s the big deal? Who cares if Google knows what web sites you visit or what you like to shop for? If I can get results from a web search are actually relevant to my interests instead of having to sift through countless search results until I find what I’m looking for, then I say bring it on.
People get so scared about Big Brother knowing everything about you, and frankly I don’t think Google cares who you are as a person. It’s not like there are all these Google employees who are sitting at their computers and laughing hysterically at you because you just bought condoms or tampons or something. Seriously, Google doesn’t care.
I’ve been hearing that this was coming for years and I’m glad the future is finally here. Now if they can just work on showing me TV commercials for products that I would actually buy.
@Amrik: Would you be comfortable with a phone company tapping your phone conversations to get better idea of your likes and dislikes and then serving you relevant ads?
I do not think there is too much issue with Google knowing which sites we visit or what we share publicly and then using that data to serve better ads. When Google mixes other private data like email with public data, then it can be annoying.
Thanks for the summary.