Here are two blog posts about Google’s new privacy policy
that I found helpful:
Life After Google: You Have Options from Lane Wilkinsen’s Sense
and Reference blog A nice summary of what the concerns are for some users, as
well as reporting on Lane’s experiment to go Google-free for 90 days, and some
of the alternative sites/services he used.
Should Google’s New Privacy Policy Concern You? On Blomberg
Businessweek.Another good summary of the issues, considering pros and cons
of data consolidation.
As for what I’m doing in response, I’m not going to give up
using Google products and services completely, but I did take this opportunity
to do a little audit of what products and services I do use.
I signed in to Google and went to my “Account Settings” and
scrolled down to “Google Privacy.” I
clicked on “Sign into Dashboard” which allowed me to look at an overview of all
my information that is stored with the various Google products such as Picasa,
Google Docs, Calendar, and so forth. I deleted stuff I don’t need from the
services I’m no longer using and made sure I had the privacy settings I wanted
for everything else. Going forward, I'm also going to try to stop being lazy in having Google be my default app for everything, and make sure I explore other alternatives before I choose.
I think it’s clear that more and more of online services are going to be looking for ways to use our data in order to either
improve their services to us or to improve their ability to direct ads and make
money for themselves. Or both. (Even more recently, the social network Path ran into trouble
after it automatically uploaded users' entire address books from their phones to
Path’s servers.)
I’m not worried about having some of my data out in the
world, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being conservative in what
you share and how. “Conservative” will mean different things to different
people, but part of what I think it does mean is being proactive in finding out
how the services you use are using your data and making decisions accordingly
about how you use that service.
I think you made a great point to take an “audit” of what Google products you use. Because of the changes, I thought about what I use and how I use them too. Maybe it’s forcing a digital spring cleaning? It definitely has a lot of people thinking and reevaluating what they use which product for.
ReplyDeleteThere are definite pros and cons to this just as anything else that comes out new like you explained. I think you utilized two great blogs that you would direct patrons to for making an informed decision. Trying to read and sift through the actual policy, what is saying and even the FAQ’s can be kind of labor intensive. It is also not stated in the simplest of terms. I can think of more questions to list on the FAQ’s as I bet others can after researching questions with the public. What are other questions that you or others have had from the public?
For the people who fear the big brother aspect in it all, they probably have given limited information already or false identifying information and will continue to do so. I don’t know how many people have gotten more questions or comments in regards to that. Anyone want to weigh in on that piece?