Attorney generals fear Google’s new privacy policy is an “invasion of privacy” | VentureBeat:
The new policy, Google has insisted, is meant to simplify things, but users, Congress, and now state attorney generals are attacking the policy for granting Google unfettered access to user data across its products.
“Google’s new privacy policy is troubling for a number of reasons,” the letter reads. “On a fundamental level, the policy appears to invade consumer privacy by automatically sharing personal information consumers input into one Google product with all Google products.”
I’ve been pondering this since Google announced the simplified and consolidated privacy policy.
Was Google really unaware of the implications of this simplification and what it meant for consolidating a user’s information into one big lump, and how users were going to react to that consolidation? Were they really that naive?
Or…
Was Google fully aware of this implication, and thought they could pull this off without people noticing and getting up in arms by calling it a simplification and declaring it to be good for everyone? Were they really that naive?
Which version of Google bothers you more? The Google that was incredibly naive about the implications of such a significant action and only saw what it thought was a good thing t do? Or the malicious Google that naively thought nobody would see through their plan to consolidate this data and thought they could pull this off with some smoke, a few mirrors and handwaving?
To be honest, I lean towards the “well meaning but incredibly naive” Google of the first choice, rather than the overtly evil and malicious Google. I’ve seen enough Google missteps to believe they’re mostly well meaning but naive, and incredibly tone deaf about the implications about things they do that impact their users. But at the same time, in a company like Google, that tone deaf, naive worldview doesn’t make me feel much better about things.
I’ve tried to come up with a third scenario that didn’t involve Google being naive or evil, and I can’t. And I can’t see a scenario where a change this significant wouldn’t create a kerfluffle over the implications of the changes — and yet, it looks like Google didn’t see a scenario where it did. If you’re that unaware of how your users think and view you, that’s a problem. Especially for a company that’s made a strong commitment to “go social”.
No matter how you look at this one, it creates a worry point about depending on Google. Not because of what they’re doing (although it’s not harmless, either), but because of the implications of how they think and how they understand their users and customers that they could do this and not see the tidal wave of criticism coming… And as far as I can tell, they didn’t, and they still aren’t working to manage the issues this is causing…
This article was posted on Chuq Von Rospach, Photographer and Author at Don’t think about this one too hard…. This article is copyright 2013 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.