Google’s Privacy Laws and What They Mean
When did the new policy take affect?
Google’s new policy privacy went into effect last week, on March 1st.
What does it mean to me?
All your Google activity will now be logged into one account, which will allow Google to display advertisements based on your history.
How do they do that?
What Google has been doing until now, is tracking everything on every user as much as possible.
However, this data was organized by each individual Google program.
For example, the ads you see displayed on your Gmail account are based on the content of your emails and the advertisements you saw via Google search were based on what you typed in on the Goggle search.
Now, with the new policy, Google is able to combine the data from your Gmail and Google search to “better” gear the advertisements to your personal interests.
What can you do about it?
Read all the gory details yourself at:
http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/
Pause Google’s web history at:
https://www.google.com/history/
To get a snapshot of what Google knows about you:
https://www.google.com/dashboard/
Is Google the only one doing this?
This concept of tracking what individual customer’s view, in an effort to target the advertisements to the right people happens across the board by many companies.
Is there anything to be afraid of?
For the most part, the information which Google collects is kept anonymous, which means they don’t actually read your emails or see who is looking at what.
However, if Google gets subpoenaed by a court, they will give over your information.
There are other companies besides Google who track your Internet habits. Some of these companies sell your data, and at times give out more personal information than you are
comfortable with.
