Is the evil Google scaring you?
Today, Google has over 60 privacy policies, but on March 1st, they will all be consolidated into one. That’s a fairly relevant bit of news, but the implications are absolutely HUGE! The new policy will make all your data available across all the Google products that you use. So if you use Gmail, and Google Calendar, and Google Search and Google+, and YouTube, and Picasa, and Google Voice, and Google Docs, and Google Maps, (which is the list of Google applications that I regularly use), then you might find this new consolidated “Privacy” policy a wee bit creepy.
There is some benefit to all this big-brother data gathering, and it might make using many of these services easier, more intuitive and more useful. It will certainly result in more targeted advertising, which is awesome news if you are an advertiser (as so many of my clients are).
There’s no opting out and there’s essentially no way to avoid getting sucked in, so we need to just accept this new normal and learn to work it to our advantage. What do you think? Could you be a fan of this new policy? Or are you totally creeped out by this all-knowing, all-seeing Google?
