“Data protection agencies in European countries have concluded Google Inc’s new privacy policy is in breach of European law, EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding said Thursday,” Estelle Shirbon reports for Reuters. “France’s data protection watchdog, the CNIL, has also cast doubt on the legality of the policy and informed Google it would lead a European-wide investigation into this.”
“Reding told BBC Radio Four data control authorities in Europe asked French counterparts to analyze the new policy,” Shirbon reports. “‘And they have come to the conclusion that they are deeply concerned, and that the new rules are not in accordance with the European law, and that the transparency rules have not been applied,’ Reding said.”
Shirbon reports, “Google said in January it was simplifying its privacy policy, consolidating 60 guidelines into a single one that will apply to all its services including YouTube, Gmail and social network Google+. Users cannot opt out of the new policy if they want to continue using Google’s services.”
Read more in the full article here.
Alma Whitten, Director of Privacy, Product and Engineering at Google has posted the following blog post regarding the company’s new privacy policy:
Our updated Privacy Policy takes effect today, March 1. As you use our products one thing will be clear: it’s the same Google experience that you’re used to, with the same controls.
And because we’re making these changes, over time we’ll be able to improve our products in ways that help our users get the most from the web.
While we’ve undertaken the most extensive user education campaign in our history to explain the coming changes, we know there has been a fair amount of chatter and confusion.
Here are a few important points to bear in mind:
Our Privacy Policy is now much easier to understand.
We’ve included the key parts from more than 60 product-specific notices into our main Google Privacy Policy—so there’s no longer any need to be your own mini search engine if you want to work out what’s going on. Our Privacy Policy now explains, for the vast majority of our services, what data we’re collecting and how we may use it, in plain language.
Our Privacy Policy will enable us to build a better, more intuitive user experience across Google for signed-in users.
If you’re signed in to Google, you expect our products to work really beautifully together. For example, if you’re working on Google Docs and you want to share it with someone on Gmail, you want their email right there ready to use. Our privacy policies have always allowed us to combine information from different products with your account—effectively using your data to provide you with a better service. However, we’ve been restricted in our ability to combine your YouTube and Search histories with other information in your account. Our new Privacy Policy gets rid of those inconsistencies so we can make more of your information available to you when using Google.
So in the future, if you do frequent searches for Jamie Oliver, we could recommend Jamie Oliver videos when you’re looking for recipes on YouTube—or we might suggest ads for his cookbooks when you’re on other Google properties.
Our privacy controls aren’t changing.
The new policy doesn’t change any existing privacy settings or how any personal information is shared outside of Google. We aren’t collecting any new or additional information about users. We won’t be selling your personal data. And we will continue to employ industry-leading security to keep your information safe.
If you don’t think information sharing will improve your experience, you can use our privacy tools to do things like edit or turn off your search history and YouTube history, control the way Google tailors ads to your interests and browse the web “incognito” using Chrome. You can use services like Search, Maps and YouTube if you are not signed in. You can even separate your information into different accounts, since we don’t combine personal information across them. And we’re committed to data liberation, so if you want to take your information elsewhere you can.
We’ll continue to look for ways to make it simpler for you to understand and control how we use the information you entrust to us. We build Google for you, and we think these changes will make our services even better.
Source: Official Google Blog
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]