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‘User is the loser’ in new Google privacy policy

By JACQUI GARRITY
THIRD parties may have access to the personal information of Google users, following a change on 1 March to the way the search engine giant structures its privacy policy.

“Anything you’ve ever typed into a search engine is now being linked with your email account, Facebook page, even photos of you,” Sunday Canberra Times journalist Frances Stewart says.

“There is no limit to the information Google can use, giving them access to everything, everything, everything.”

Google says it will depersonalise information so that it is using numbers about people in general not about specific users, “but in order to do that,” Stewart says, “Google have to know about you specifically.”

Yet even when personally identifiable data is restricted, the big concern about online privacy is aggregation.

With the new policy, Google intends to combine all of the data they collect about its millions of users into a single account profile.

While Stewart explains that Google already has all of this information and nothing within former privacy policies have prevented the data from being collected and collated, when the issue of collecting personally identifiable information and storing it is raised, most Google users would expect to have control over what data is shared and when this happens.

According to the General Editor of Australia’s leading privacy and data protection journal, Privacy Law Bulletin, Bruce Arnold, the concern for many people is that we don’t know what’s going on.

“We don’t know what information is being shared,” he said. “We don’t know how it’s being shared, we don’t know who it’s going to, and we don’t know whether the information is being shared on a quite formal basis in response to a subpoena or if it’s simply being given to business.”

Google has admitted that aggregated information will be made available to business and perhaps government, but it has been suggested that insurance companies and bank managers might have some access to the information as well.

“The changes will allow business to get a huge amount of information about consumer trends,” technology writer Craig Gamble says.

“I would be surprised if they’d ever divulge ‘personal’ information, in fact I think they’d be mad to even consider it, but stranger things have happened.

“It’s only reasonable to have doubts that they are divulging all they plan to do.

“It’s also quite hard to stop a company like Google gathering information on you even if you employ things like ‘private browsing’ or ‘no tracking’ when you surf the web. I think there are levels of tracking of our online behaviour that most of us would feel comfortable with, but Google’s new rules do not fall within that.”

Google claims the change is an attempt to simplify the browsing experience for users, removing the need for a different privacy policy for each of its 60 or more services.

“I think ‘streamlining’ is at best a euphemism,” Gamble says. “As far as I can make out Google is trying to do two things with this change. One, hopefully drive traffic to their own social media service Google Plus by making connections between users, and two, targeting the ads a user sees based on that user’s activity across their accounts.”

According to Stewart, the change puts Google one step closer to global domination.

“They’re already close to it,” she says. “They’ve got so many aspects of their own business; email, maps, business guides and they’re even challenging Facebook. In a sense it would be crazy of them not to link those things once they’ve got them. Although perhaps people won’t be aware of all of the downfalls of this until it happens.”

For all Google’s talk of changing the privacy policy to benefit the user, according to Gamble, “the user is the loser here.

“It’s another ‘engineering’ led Google decision, they come up with something they think is a cool idea, and put it into place before thinking about all the consequences, and privacy does not seem to be high on their list.”

Bruce Arnold agrees. “Google’s not doing this out of the goodness of its heart; Google is anticipating changes in Europe.

“There is recognition now certainly in the advanced economies that information is power, information is money.”

The European Union and the US government are significantly tightening their privacy frameworks, largely in response to criticisms from consumers and advocacy groups as people now have some awareness of the problems concerning privacy protection, confidentiality and data protection.

Google is arguably “trying to shape the agenda,” Arnold says. “But in terms of whether there is really meaningful privacy protection then no.”

According to Arnold, the issue of online privacy should be much bigger than the changes to Google’s policy.

“People are overly concentrating on Google and ignoring the need to think about regulation of privacy outside the Google cloud, and that’s the big concern here.

“So privacy specialists such as myself are appalled and profoundly depressed and possibly even angry that the debate is just about the search engines or just about Facebook and the policy debate, consumer awareness just isn’t picking up issues right across the spectrum.”

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