Google's single privacy policy. Calm down dear!

So, 1st March 2012 saw Google imple­ment its sin­gle pri­vacy pol­icy across all of its ser­vices. And, you can under­stand why they did it. They go from over 60 sep­a­rate poli­cies to a sin­gle one that enables them to track user data and web activ­ity gath­ered on one Google ser­vice and use it across a num­ber (but not all) of their other ser­vices. So, the stuff that I search for on Google will affect the adver­tis­ing that I’m shown on YouTube.

Image source: http://www.valuewalk.com/2012/02/how-to-stop-google-from-collecting-your-web-history

 

Google’s posi­tion is that it sim­pli­fies every­thing and it’s in the cus­tomers’ best inter­ests. After all, they are given con­tex­tu­ally rel­e­vant adver­tis­ing and pro­mo­tions based on their pro­file, brows­ing his­tory and implied inter­ests.  But, the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion have a markedly dif­fer­ent view and sug­gest the sin­gle pol­icy is in breach of Euro­pean law. The EU’s jus­tice com­mis­sioner Viviane Red­ing is on record as say­ing that the “trans­parency rules have not been applied”.

In an obvi­ous response to this, Google’s coun­tered with the fol­low­ing state­ment – “We are con­fi­dent that our new sim­ple, clear and trans­par­ent pri­vacy pol­icy respects all Euro­pean data pro­tec­tion laws and prin­ci­ples.” It’s up to you to decide who to believe…

The only way to opt-out is to not use Google ser­vices. But this is not real­is­tic for most peo­ple given the per­va­sive­ness of Google – Search, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, Blog­ger, etc. Even harder if you have an Android phone – as signing-up and agree­ing to Google’s poli­cies are a require­ment to switch­ing the phone on.

You can delete your brows­ing his­tory on Google or view­ing his­tory on YouTube. But, in real­ity, how many peo­ple are going to do this and remem­ber to keep doing it? Given we are talk­ing about over 60 sep­a­rate ser­vices, I would wager, the major­ity of the pop­u­la­tion would never bother.

An eye-opening exer­cise is to check out your pro­file on Google Dash­board. If you add your online his­tory to this data, Google have an increas­ingly pow­er­ful propo­si­tion to us mar­keters. For exam­ple, YouTube seems to be the only Google ser­vice that knows my age and gen­der. Now all of their ser­vices know this and can mar­ket to me accordingly.

Inter­est­ingly, there are some spe­cific Google prod­ucts that aren’t shown on the Google Dash­board. And, while I care lit­tle about the defunct Google Wave, I’d like to know what level of detail they hold in Google AdWords and Google Places.

IMHO — Let’s keep things in per­spec­tive. Yes, Google is richer than Croe­sus, but this type of activ­ity pays for the ser­vices we all love to use for free. And, I frankly don’t see the real prob­lem. We are always going to be exposed to adver­tis­ing, why not have them rel­e­vant to my per­ceived inter­ests. We’ve also been doing it for years with the likes of the Tesco Club­card, where all of our shop­ping activ­i­ties are used to pro­file offers and promotions. I guar­an­tee Tesco use this data to cross-sell other prod­ucts like insur­ance, mobile phones and inter­net access.

And, yes, the sci­ence isn’t per­fect yet, but it will get there (espe­cially now that Google can use the infor­ma­tion across mul­ti­ple ser­vices). A case in point, I was recently look­ing at Saga hol­i­days for my par­ents. Now Google is con­vinced I’m over 60, plan­ning for my retire­ment and in need of incon­ti­nence pants. Had they used my age and gen­der from data held at YouTube, this would not have happened.

If we look a lit­tle into the future, there’s some good things that could come out of this sin­gle pol­icy. For exam­ple, based on your cur­rent loca­tion and the cur­rent traf­fic con­di­tions, Google will let you know that you might be late for that meet­ing you’ve arranged via Google Cal­en­dar and sug­gest an appro­pri­ate alert to send to your client via Gmail. Nice

Being a mar­keter, this is the type of activ­ity that has lead to a resur­gence in dis­play adver­tis­ing. We’ve been work­ing exten­sively with our part­ners at The MIG and the their Zap Trader plat­form to effec­tively tar­get web users based on their behav­iour and pref­er­ences. This means we can achieve greater effi­ciency and improved per­for­mance for our clients, at the same time as pro­vid­ing rel­e­vant pro­mo­tions to their cus­tomers. It will now get even bet­ter with Google’s sin­gle pri­vacy policy.

But, if you’re still wor­ried about Google’s sin­is­ter inten­tions, check out the Elec­tronic Fron­tier Foundation’s com­plete guide to pro­tect­ing your pri­vacy.