What the Google Privacy Policy Changes Mean to You

The internet is a bit up in arms again, as Google has announced its new privacy policy. This new policy takes over 60 different privacy policies and combines them into one new one, written in easy-to-understand, plain English.

The funny part is that Google has actually changed little. The main difference here is that they are now telling you in plain English what they are doing with your information, and that has a lot of people thinking twice about whether they want to use Google’s services, including Gmail, Google+, and YouTube anymore.

Google has announced that they are going to be sharing data across all of their networks. This means that if you do a Google search for an STD or some bizarre fetish you have, that topic may just show up all over the suggested videos on YouTube the next time you’re trying to show your friend a funny cat video.

Likewise, you could mention a little known secret in a confidential email to your friend in Gmail, and have products and services related to that secret popping up all over the search ads the next time you do a Google search.

Furthermore, these “profile matches” might just follow you away from Google, as they share some of that information with other companies and track you as you move from website to website. They can even track you when you aren’t even logged in!

(This should sound familiar to users of Facebook, which also tracks its users movements across the web, logged in or not.)

The bottom line is, if you really care about your privacy and your secrets, you probably should stay away from all of Google’s services.

If you’re looking for a new search engine, DuckDuckGo.com can be added easily to Firefox, Chrome, or even Safari as your default search engine. They also have iPhone and iPad apps that are really great as well.