Google Privacy Policy: 36 Attorneys General Express Strong Concerns

A group of U.S. state attorneys are speaking out against Google's planned overhaul to its privacy settings. No, this isn't about its app privacy policy or browser tracking, though lately it seems like you need a scorecard to keep track of all the privacy issues Google is dealing with at the moment.

The National Association of Attorneys General said in an open letter to Google CEO Larry Page stating that the group had "strong concerns" with the the way Google plans to consolidate its multiple privacy policies into one single agreement.

"Until now, users of Google's many products could use different products in different ways, expecting that information they provide for one product, such as YouTube, would not be synthesized with information they provide for another product, such as Gmail and Maps," the association said in the letter. "The new policy forces these consumers to allow information across all of these products to be shared, without giving them the proper ability to opt out."

searchenginewatch.com...

I have spent 2 hours painstakingly deleting all my google.youtube accounts. For me it is one of principle; I do not LIKE their new rules and regulations, and instead of being like the rest of the sheeple and saying that is just the way it is, I closed everything.

If more people would dump their extra services, then you could really make a stand. Starting March 1, I will be using another search engine as well that is completely independent of google.

I too decided to make changes to how and if I used Google products online when this official policy was announced. I had been using gmail for years, so I opened an different email, as well as changing search engines. Youtube accounts are a bit tougher as they require a gmail account, so I am still working on that one. I will probably wind up opening a brand new gmail account, expressly in order to open a new youtube account, and rebuilding my youtube account from there.

To be honest, I believe that there is the strong possibility that Google has already been sticking their hands in the cross platform data cookie jar. Running a youtube page, logged in under my main gmail account, the service would be unavailable if I opened any web browser page to my alternate gmail account. However, I felt that the public announcement of policy change was the last straw, and felt I had to dump google altogether, in at least a stand on principle.

Its good to hear that others feel the same way.

reply to post by Open2Truth


Good luck Truth, opening a new gmail account. You will be abysmally surprised to find in order to open a new account you have to submit your cell phone number and receive a text message from there with a alpha numeric code to activate a new account.

That, was the last straw for me when I obtained my old gmail account I just deleted through their invite only system, when they gave each person like 50 invites some ten years ago!

Here are some things you can do.

Use metacrawler or dogpile as your search engine.
Get Ghostery add on plug in for mozilla firefox. This will let you know everybody trying to datamine from you. I have blocked over 15 from ATS alone. I'll post my blocked log after this post as it is a bit long.
Get something else like Ad-Aware as a backup, but I've been using Ghostery and it's been fascinating seeing how much data is truly being mined.

reply to post by ArchPlayer


Ghostery picked all this up on ATS main page.

Blocked script: s7.addthis.com... origin: www.dogpile.com
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reply to post by ArchPlayer


Thanks for the reminder, I completely forgot about what it takes to get a new gmail account. Well I won't be doing that then. I may just have to can the whole idea of a youtube account. I'll live.

Thanks for the suggestions and tools, I will be putting them to good use.

reply to post by Open2Truth


My friend tells me hushmail is a good choice, with no b.s. and complete data encryption on the https side. Worth taking a look.

reply to post by ArchPlayer


Item

Google New Privacy Policy Break European Data Protection Laws
worldundercontrol.com...

Google have made a bid to further erode our privacy through their new (no) privacy policy, which also breaks European Data Protection laws according to the French National Commission for Computing and Freedom (CNIL).

The CNIL found that;

“preliminary findings show that Google’s new policy fails to meet the requirements of the European Data Protection Directive (95/46/CE) regarding the information that must be provided to data subjects.”

The commision also say that;

“rather than promoting transparency, the terms of the new policy … raise fears and questions about Google’s actual practices.”

The amount of data Google is collecting is also a fear because of;

“the combination of data across services”

and they worry

“about the lawfulness and fairness of such processing.”

The new policy means that Google can share private information with it’s partners and third parties such as advertising companies.

This isn’t the first time Google has been caught violating users privacy, it was revealed last month that Google was monitoring browsers and even disabled Safari settings.
worldundercontrol.com...

Well i have i discussed this on my blog looks like Google tracks your Music Habits on youtube aswell.