Via Gizmodo
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In a privacy policy shift,
Google announced today that it will begin tracking users universally
across all its services—Gmail, Search, YouTube and more—and sharing data
on user activity across all of them. So much for the Google we signed
up for.
The change was announced in a blog post today,
and will go into effect March 1. After that, if you are signed into
your Google Account to use any service at all, the company can use that
information on other services as well. As Google puts it:
Our new Privacy Policy makes clear that, if you're signed in, we may
combine information you've provided from one service with information
from other services. In short, we'll treat you as a single user across
all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google
experience.
This has been long coming. Google's privacy policies have been
shifting towards sharing data across services, and away from data
compartmentalization for some time. It's been consistently
de-anonymizing you, initially requiring real names with Plus, for
example, and then tying your Plus account to your Gmail account. But
this is an entirely new level of sharing. And given all of the negative
feedback that it had with Google+ privacy issues, it's especially
troubling that it would take actions that further erode users' privacy.
What this means for you is that data from the things you search for,
the emails you send, the places you look up on Google Maps, the videos
you watch in YouTube, the discussions you have on Google+ will all be
collected in one place. It seems like it will particularly affect
Android users, whose real-time location (if they are Latitude users),
Google Wallet data and much more will be up for grabs. And if you have
signed up for Google+, odds are the company even knows your real name,
as it still places hurdles in front of using a pseudonym (although it no longer explicitly requires users to go by their real names).
All of that data history will now be explicitly cross-referenced.
Although it refers to providing users a better experience (read: more
highly tailored results), presumably it is so that Google can deliver
more highly targeted ads. (There has, incidentally, never been a better
time to familiarize yourself with Google's Ad Preferences.)
So why are we calling this evil? Because Google changed the rules
that it defined itself. Google built its reputation, and its
multi-billion dollar business, on the promise of its "don't be evil"
philosophy. That's been largely interpreted as meaning that Google will
always put its users first, an interpretation that Google has cultivated
and encouraged. Google has built a very lucrative company on the
reputation of user respect. It has made billions of dollars in that
effort to get us all under its feel-good tent. And now it's pulling the
stakes out, collapsing it. It gives you a few weeks to pull your data
out, using its data-liberation service, but if you want to use Google
services, you have to agree to these rules.
Google's philosophy speaks directly to making money without doing evil. And it is very explicit in calling out advertising in the section on "evil."
But while it emphasizes that ads should be relevant, obvious, and "not
flashy," what seems to have been forgotten is a respect for its users
privacy, and established practices.
Among its privacy principles, number four notes:
People have different privacy concerns and needs. To best serve the
full range of our users, Google strives to offer them meaningful and
fine-grained choices over the use of their personal information. We
believe personal information should not be held hostage and we are
committed to building products that let users export their personal
information to other services. We don‘t sell users' personal
information.
This crosses that line. It eliminates that fine-grained control, and
means that things you could do in relative anonymity today, will be
explicitly associated with your name, your face, your phone number come
March 1st. If you use Google's services, you have to agree to this new
privacy policy. Yet a real concern for various privacy concerns would
recognize that I might not want Google associating two pieces of
personal information.
And much worse, it is an explicit reversal of its previous policies. As Google noted in 2009:
Previously, we only offered Personalized Search for signed-in users,
and only when they had Web History enabled on their Google Accounts.
What we're doing today is expanding Personalized Search so that we can
provide it to signed-out users as well. This addition enables us to
customize search results for you based upon 180 days of search activity
linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser. It's completely separate
from your Google Account and Web History (which are only available to
signed-in users). You'll know when we customize results because a "View
customizations" link will appear on the top right of the search results
page. Clicking the link will let you see how we've customized your
results and also let you turn off this type of customization.
The changes come shortly after Google revamped its search results to include social results it called Search plus Your World. Although that move has drawn heavy criticism from all over the Web, at least it gives users the option to not participate.
