Just after its successful campaign against legislation (SOPA) that could have eviscerated the concept of “fair use” and potentially restricted free speech on the Internet, Google has made a troubling shift in its own privacy policies.
Google claims that it is simply consolidating privacy policies across its many internet services including its search engine, YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps, and its Google + social network.
But many of us who use these different services and are aware of how much of our web presence they can track are rightly concerned that our privacy is about to be sold, literally, to the highest bidder.
How much can we trust Google to keep its promise of “don't be evil” under the pressure of advertisers to provide the most minute and up-to-date information about everything we buy, where we go, and what our interests are?
And will Google put its own financial self-interest above its ethical obligations to allow its users to “opt out” of at least some of this tracking? Under the current proposed changes, there is no “opt out” for Googlers, unless they decide to stop using its services altogether.
Clearly there is always a trade-off between personal privacy and the convenience of getting information almost instantaneously whenever we use the web. My personal privacy policy is never to write anything in an email, blog, or on a social-networking site that I wouldn't be comfortable having appear on the front page of The New York Times.
But that doesn't mean that I want Google to keep track of what kind of medical information I might be seeking or what websites I read. And if I were a researcher looking into a topic like women passing as men (and I have researched this topic for a book I wrote), I wouldn't want that research to indicate anything about my own personal gender identity.
But these infringements on privacy seem picayune, when you think about the potential for this kind of aggregated information to be abused by hackers, identity thieves, and repressive governments who want to track down and suppress their political opponents.
Right now Google is proposing to scan the text of all emails and retain this information indefinitely; this change alone raises serious privacy concerns, and thirty-one privacy and civil liberties organizations have written a letter to Google asking for the suspension of its Gmail service until these policies are clarified.
This morning when I used Google maps to figure out the best bike route to an appointment, I was asked to click “Allow” for Google to find my location, but I have no idea what else I may have “allowed” since no service agreement or disclosure statement popped up for me to scroll through. And there didn't seem to be any way to get the route information I wanted without making this choice.
So now when I send email, I have to face the prospect that somewhere my words are being stored, and I have no say over who has access to them, and or how they will be used at some future date.
When I use my Android phone, Google can approximate my location because the phone reports back its location based on GPS data and the cell tower it's connected to. Right now Google states that there is no link between that data and the data collected when you check your Gmail on the same phone, but one can imagine that this could change as Google works to integrate its different services. Advertisers would be thrilled to know that you just asked a friend to coffee, and that they now have the opportunity to recommend the nearest Starbucks, whether you asked for that information or not.
I am not claiming that these changes indicate that Google is about to become the next incarnation of Big Brother. But the aggregation of so many different kinds of personal data by such a large and dominant corporate player in the Internet world should give consumers pause, particularly when Google is not giving us the choice to keep our personal data from joining the billions of other pieces of data it collects every time its users search, watch a video, send email, or try to map a route. Consumers should not be forced to forfeit their privacy in order to access the web, and they also deserve full disclosure of how that information is being used and will be used in the future.
Please, Google, don't sell us out!
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The following clarifications on Google's new privacy policies were sent to me by a Google employee, and I wanted to share them with my readers:
It says on https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/ that "Our privacy principles remain unchanged. And we’ll never sell your personal information or share it without your permission (other than rare circumstances like valid legal requests)."
What that means is that on March 1, as in the past, nobody but you will ever see a single word of your gmail. You worry that "I have to face the prospect that somewhere my words will be stored and shared with advertisers." Yes, your gmail is tored (how else could we show it to you?), but no, your words are never shared with anyone. The advertisers will never see any of your words, nor any profile information derived from your words. They won't know what words are in your mail, they won't know that one of their ads has matched your mail, they won't even know that you have a gmail account. If you click on the ad, only then will you be connected to their website, and from that point they will in fact know the ip address of your computer (just as every web site must know that), but they won't know anything about your identity or the contents of your mail, or what caused the ad to show up in the first place.
The same is true across all properties. No information whatsoever goes to the advertiser. Or anyone else. We use information internally to show better ads. If you click on an ad, that is the first an advertiser knows about you, and it is up to you what you want to do on the advertiser's web site.
I agree with you that there is a potential for annoying ads to show up on your phone offering a coupon for a nearby store. There is also the potential for very useful ads. It is a bigger problem on the phone because the screen is small; on a desktop with a large screen it is easy to ignore the ads on the side. It will be up to us to display ads on the phone in such a way that the helpful ones can be easily found and the annoying ones can be easily ignored. We aren't doing that yet, but we, and the rest of the industry, will have to figure out how. (That's one reason why we formed Android: we wanted there to be competition among smartphone platforms, so that consumers would have a choice and could switch if they got annoyed.)
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