Google's New Privacy Policy

When I logged into Gmail yesterday, I was greeted with a message announcing Google's new privacy policy. Instead of 60 different policies for the 60 arms of Google (Gmail, Web searching, You Tube, Google News, etc.) the company is moving to one all-encompassing policy. The result is that Google will know and share a lot more information about you.

Here are the details, according to American Public Media's Marketplace Tech Report:

Google is changing its approach to how it treats the information it gathers from you. The result of the change will likely be that Google knows a lot more about you than it used to.

Traditionally, Google has had separate privacy policies and separate terms of service for each site it operates. YouTube has one agreement, Google News might use another, Google+ something else. The idea behind the new privacy policy is that it will cover all of Google. That will mean the different parts of Google will be free to use information about you with each other.

"The classic example they've been rolling out to explain this is maybe you've done a lot of searches for skateboarding on Google web search," says Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land, "and now you click over later in the day to the YouTube home page. YouTube can see maybe what you've been searching on on Google web search and say, oh, you're really interested in skateboarding so I'm going to prepopulate the YouTube homepage perhaps with a lot of skateboard videos."....

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