The new privacy policy is clearly written, brief, well-worded, has no legalese and states clearly that all Google products are from... surprise, one company, Google. Every time you log in to use one of their several products, Google will track your online usage to make the Google experience, as a whole, more personalized and better at finding what you are searching for. You can opt out of sharing your data by simple going to your dashboard and turning all data collection off. It makes you aware of the fact that if you don't want your data to be collected ever, use anonymous geographically-remote proxy servers, anonymous names, stay logged out of ALL services (i.e don't ever accept any cookies in your browser) and use incognito mode all the time. All of these are doable but people just don't care that much. But they do have an option. It's not as if Google is taking this freedom away. It's just shaking you up and telling you about it in simple words.
If you are paranoid and believe that ignorance is bliss, you can always use Micro$hit's Bing or Hotmail and ignore their ginormously long, terribly dry, completely dense, loopholes-ridden legal privacy policy and stop using Google. What is the point here? The minute you are online people will collect data about you, like it or not. It is how the internet operates; on collected data, and personalization. (e:Paul) is collecting data about your browser, about your OS and recording your IP as you are reading this. So are ALL the sites you go to. With the IP everyone can pretty much localize where you live if they want to. In addition, your information can also tell (e:paul) and everyone else how long you have been on any particular site, where you came from, which links you are clicking on and what you are doing at this very moment. Are you freaked out about that? If you are on Freakfacebook, it has access to ALL that you and your extended circle of family and friends said, did and/or posted. It's privacy policy is about a zillion pages of no-one-can-understand-this legalese.
Some bring transparency to the process by making it simple for you to understand what data is being collected, some hope you won't read those zillion page legalese tomes and some don't tell you at all.
The reaction of various thick-in-their-heads government agencies to Google's new policy is funny. Because they suddenly seem to have woken up to the basic nature of the internet. And pointing fingers at the one company that is actually taking some pains to make it transparent while conveniently ignoring the really intrusive privacy policies (search for the Apple privacy policy that (e:Paul) posted sometime back*) that are tougher to understand but are probably more invasive than Google will ever resort to. It is clearly another classic example of how all governments are made of morons who probably can't do anything else and have lied their way into slimy politics, and who take the shooting-the-messenger always a bit too far, because they are probably are too dumb to recognize the messenger even.
Well, the people are not as dumb as you, dear government. We have options and we will utilize them, if we want to. Why don't you go and do something more productive that does not involve bringing crap censorship to the internet and fear mongering about online services? I suspect you cannot. Because you don't really know how to help the people you manipulated and coerced into voting for you in the first place.
- itunes privacy policy: (e:Paul,54481)
- data collection on the internet: (e:paul,54665)
Simple solution. You could set up multiple accounts with multiple anonymous names and IDs and use separate services on each.
I don't know about the government people getting upset.... I think the part that gets them upset isn't Google (1 with a thousand 0's with a small g showed up red lined that is wrong it is a number argh) making the privacy the same for all the sites.... It is that they also have them integrated.. That being said What I think they are really upset about is their law being shut down..... Imagine if they could go to Google and say yeah this blog has copyrighted music and then Google could shut down ever place on the web it was and every website..... I think that is what really has them upset?
In the end, whatever they collect is nothing compared with the treasure trove of data and overall picture that the ISPs and the government maintain. Its all kind of meaningless. There is no simple way to be anonymous and still have the convenience of anytime, anywhere internet.