[Google] The 2012 Privacy Policy Clean-Up

Image by Aray Chen via Flickr

This may be a case of "Be Careful What You Wish For" in terms of Google's recently announced changes to their privacy policies and their terms of service. It all depends on where you stand, I suppose.

On the one hand, a lot of folks have written about how complicated a lot of the various privacy policies are, especially for companies with multiple products like Google. In the previously linked blog post, they detail having over 70 different privacy documents and interrelated terms of service policies in place to manage their different products and services. Thus the natural thrust for many privacy advocates has been to push for simplifying such policies documents and making it easier for users to understand how their personal information is used and for what purposes.

Also, a lot of folks expect the different Google products to play nice with one another. It's not unreasonable to expect that using Gmail should have natural synergies with other Google Apps like Google Calendar and so on and so forth. Until the advent of Google+, the Google ecosystem felt largely scattered with each product sort of living on its own with very limited integration.

The new Google privacy policy attempts to address these concerns by creating one larger policy document that covers most of their products except for a few special cases like Google Chrome and Google Wallet. For the most part this seems like a tremendous step in the right direction since it means only needing to read and study one larger policy document.

The flip side, as other bloggers and journalists are already pointing out, is the fact that part of the changes includes language indicating that Google will now freely use data gathered from all covered products to aid with their efforts to personalize its services based on your user habits and such. It makes sense given greater integration between Google products can't happen unless data sharing happens as well, but naturally this has some people uncomfortable

[Social Networks] Problems With Facebook's Cookies

I've had an odd love-hate relationship with Facebook's social plugins over the years, mainly because of the many changes that have been made to the site and the resulting impact this has on Facebook's perceived privacy approach. I'm not talking about their official privacy policy or anything like that - this is more about how the rest of the world receives such changes and determines the impact on everyone's life.

A great example of this is probably Facebook's Like button. At first, I was pretty wary about it given it was designed to report back your browsing activity on different sites to Facebook for the purposes of showing you which of your friends have liked the same article and so on. At first I would only browse Facebook using Chrome's Incognito mode, in order to keep my browsing secure from the Facebook cookie reporting. And then eventually I weaned off this as adoption became greater and I decided to gamble on Facebook to see where these plugins might lead to.

Then I took the next step and actually created a Facebook Like page for the Geeky Guide to "promote the brand" and also try to foster a community between Geeky Guide readers. It's been a fun experiment for sure and I now have about 150+ fans who publicly support the site, which is cool.

But then increased scrutiny of Facebook's privacy practices have been the talk of the talk recently starting with their big revamp of the News Feed to include the Ticker and the option for site owners to push content to people's Ticker streams without explicitly consent and of course the more recent Facebook cookie tracking snafu where Facebook's cookies continue to report on your site usage even when logged out of Facebook.

[Google] Google Search Privacy: Plain and Simple

Google has started a series of web videos about their privacy practices, to help assure the more privacy and identify theft conscious out there. I like this video a lot - it's very simple and direct to the point and certainly helps explain the basis to those not very technical or familiar with the types of information you can access online.

[Web] Spock is Now in Public Beta

Personal search engine Spock has gone into open beta this week so general sign-ups are now possible. I wanted to get in before but didn't make it to the closed beta testing phase. Darn.

The premise behind Spock is that it's a search engine more geared towards finding people and not just individual pages related to that person. It's ambitious given what they're trying to do - part search engine, part social network and part privacy issue.

I like the concept of trying to link together all pages, web services, email addresses, phone numbers, etc about a person in one place. Putting people at the search philosophy is certainly a great idea. Of course the challenge is how to manage that information well, how to associate the right details to the right person and of course how to protect that information from being used abusively.

I created a profile for two reasons - (1) to test the service out and (2) to see what information I could control about myself. The pages are loading really slow right now, I assume because of the sheer volume of new users testing the service out. The options seem simple enough - you can add tags to describe yourself more, link people to you, associate web pages you have profiles on and of course add personal details like your birthday, your email addresses, your phone numbers, etc.

The index is pretty small for now (still in the millions) but there are a surprising number of people already there - probably more because of their adopting the databases of social networks already out there. However they are actively trying to grow it over time and this is what gets some people nervous how the site's spiders are trawling the web for personal information and making it available in one place.

It's too early to give a final verdict on the site for now, but it does seem promising and scary at the same time.