Google's New Privacy Policy: The Story Behind It

Greetings on the occasion of India�s 63rd Republic Day!

If you are a Google service user you are already in receipt of the notification from Google announcing its new privacy policy. This development has set the web afire with all shades of reactions. Larry Dignan at ZDNet believes that Google now knows more about you than your wife does. Others are convinced that this will strengthen the hands of regulators who are already miffed with Google�s monopolistic vision. This comes bang on the heels of last week�s failure to meet quarterly earning prediction, and the fact that user adoption of Google Plus, the social media platform that it hoped would be a gamechanger is still at about an eighth of Facebook. Not a great press time for the guys at Google, this one.

What is the new privacy policy?
The bottomline of the new policy is that Google will now replace all its privacy policies across almost all its (more than 70) products and services with one single policy that will treat the user as one entity on all its services. This policy comes without an opt-out, and is going to be in force from March 1, 2012. What this means for the user is that Google will now be able to integrate all the information (which, incidentally, you have already given them permission to acquire in the individual terms of agreements whenever you registered for a Google service) and use it to offer a better and more intuitive experience as well as use it to generate more targeted advertising on its sites. For more details about the new policy, head over to the policy page on Google, or take a look at Alma Whitten�s (Director, Privacy for Product and Engineering, Google) official blog post on this subject. In this post, we take a look at exit options, the impact of this policy, and the story behind how Google got to this point.
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