Google's new privacy policy

[purplecat]

Not entirely getting the panic.

I fully recognise that there are probably some people who were relying in an important way on Google Search, Google Mail, YouTube and Blogger keeping their information separate. However Google has given lots of warning that the change is coming, and I don't see any reason in principle why a web-based company should not share information between all its web-based services so long as it's up-front about the fact. So I find it hard to work up even the low-level sense of outrage I occasionally manage when Facebook springs some sweeping change to privacy settings on me.

I do, of course, see that Google's emphasis on "real names only" for Google+ etc may prevent people with legitimate reasons to operate pseudonymously when online from accessing Google's other services. But its real names policy seems to me to be tangential to the issue of linking its data. Obviously the issues interact, but I see more reason to fight the real names only policy than to fight the new privacy policy.

What I'm really not clear about is why it is particularly important that I, personally, take various steps (or should have done since it's now March 1st and so I'm basically doomed) to scrub my information from all Google's platforms. I mean this is the company whose search engine (when it confesses to knowing anything about me at all) thinks I'm a man, between the ages of 25 and 35 who's main interests are computer games, American football and women's clothing. I wouldn't actually be complaining if they could join a few more dots than that, to be honest. I should really re-check it, come to think of it, and see if, now they've linked my web search to my Google+ account, they've managed to work out I'm female.

Maybe I'm failing to see the panic because I'm moderately careful about who gets what personal information anyway, and have never assumed that any company (especially one based in the US) is going to keep it entirely secure and inviolate. I also suspect I tend to over-estimate rather than under-estimate the ease with which my online identities could be linked. Frankly, I was surprised to learn that Google+ wasn't already linked up with Blogger, YouTube and Search!!

Maybe I'm failing to see the panic simply because I don't really use most of these services. I use search a lot, I post videos for family to YouTube, but my usage of all the over services is minimal to non-existent.

Comments

[kayim]

I agree with you, but I think we're amongst the few people who aren't panicking.

Google knows who I am. I know they scan my emails for keywords to make sure I get the "best" adverts for me on my gmail page (which is always highly amusing). I know they can link my Facebook to my gmail (as evidenced a while back when I was testing a new, fake account at work).

I'd be more concerned if I found my LJ being connected to those things, to be honest, but in the grand scheme of things? I don't do anything online that I'm ashamed of. I might have a few uncomfortable conversations with my mother or my daughter if they found some of my fic, but that's about it.

If I had anything *really* dodgy to discuss online, I wouldn't :)

[purplecat]

I got trolled on an online game not so long ago. I was surprised that although they managed to follow me as far as, I think, fanfiction.net, they never got any further. Leastways, there was never a pip out of them on LJ and they were, briefly, determined to cause maximum heart-ache. I suspect, mind you, I was protected more by their stupidity than because my LJ identity is particularly difficult to ascertain.

But, as you say, if its going to be a catastrophe if someone discovers something about you, then don't reveal it online, especially in any social networking space. Or, if you do, be careful enough about your anonymity that the linkage of a couple of data bases won't bring the whole thing crashing down.

[kayim]

I had a few issues last year when my original gmail account got hacked. I got it back, but paranoia hit in for a while and I spent a lot of time separating fandom from personal stuff.

I try to keep most things separate still now, mainly because I have high hopes of becoming a published author one day, but it's not all that difficult to connect Kayim to my RL identity.

[purplecat]

I don't have any strong reasons to keep information well separated, though I like to avoid forcing fandom upon work colleagues, or fanfiction upon more general fannish friends but I generally leave a bread crumb trail so people can find me if they want to link me up.

I've had a couple of nasty moments, once when a student wrote an abusive email about my daughter (and that caused me to place most information about her and my family behind various sorts of password protection - it's not super secure but someone has to be doing more than a bit of random stalking late at night while drunk to find out much about her) and once the aforementioned trolling, which mostly demonstrated that your average troll isn't prepared to look far and really does just lose interest if you refuse to respond to their trolling. I have gradually worked out boundaries for what sorts of information I'm prepared to put where, and I'm more careful than some about sharing passwords between services, but most of what I do comes down to common sense and an assessment of what the likely risks are.

Not sure about the published author thing. I get the impression that with any degree of celebrity comes the need to manage your web presence very carefully because fan backlash is never pretty and inevitable to a certain extent, so you need ways to separate out fan contact from friend contact so you always have a place to run and hide and be yourself. So that's a very particular case when you need identities to be difficult to link.

Someone actively and determinedly malicious could cause a lot of trouble, but they can almost whatever you do. I feel I'm fairly secure against drive-by troublemakers though.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

My only problem with Google is that when they have linked stuff that does not need/want linking, I keep having to set up new personas. I am so many Google-people, I think I could set up a small kingdom (ruled, obviously, by me. But wearing which hat???)

[purplecat]

Yes, I can see it must be inconvenient for anyone who needs to worry about SEO to any extent, because of the need to find out what results someone who isn't them is going to get.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Oh, well that's not really a problem - you just use a browser that you never use to log into anything and therefore uncustomised, and set it to clear history. I use IE as my plain-vanilla browser. And anyway, for SEO I prefer to use enquiries and traffic as my main metric, there's no messing about with 'I can't see what you can see' in that situation,if people are actually making phonecalls and sending emails you can be pretty sure they are real...

But I still have several different hats - a dog rescue hat, an SEO hat, an archaeological-interests hat, an acting-on-behalf-of-a-widget-manufacturer, acting-on-behalf-of-a-specialist-travel-agent, etc etc. and they don't always play nicely together.

Although in theory Google provides my 'agency' login which provides for multiple work-related hats, that is somewhat limited in functionality. They assume that the people who pay the bills will have their own logins to the tools, but in my case, the person that my clients trust and expect to sort out any niggles is mostly me, they don't have in-house staff working on it. They don't know how the technology works and they don't want to (I do try to get them interested, but it's a steep and slippery slope!) So I tend to end up creating multiple IDs, because otherwise my poor clients are constantly forwarding me messages from Google with panicky 'What do I do about this???' requests for help. Or they delete them on the grounds that 'Bunn will sort it out' - which can be a pain if Bunn did not actually know that anything needed sorting...

[fredbassett]

I find the ability of people like facebook and linked in to data mine information even if you don't allow them to link to your address book scary enough, so I don't exactly look on this with approval, but then I don't entirely understand quite what they're doing, either.

Mind you, I'm not wholly sure I want people to have access to my browser history!

[purplecat]

Well I don't think any people who didn't previously have access to your browser history (or, in this case, the history of search terms typed into Google) will suddenly have acquired it. All the information stays within Google so remains as vulnerable as it ever was to the US's laxer data protection laws and the ability of the US gov to seize files and so on.

However now, when running their algorithms to target ads at you Google Search can take a peek at what you've been looking at on YouTube to tailor those ads, and YouTube can take a peek at your Google Search history in order to tailor those ads. In the event that Google were to buy up LJ or FaceBook or something then presumably that data would go into the big melting pot as well. But its all still Google if you take my meaning, and the safety of your data still basically depends upon the extent to which Google is both competent and ethical.

If it worries you at all, clearing out your browser's cookies regularly will make it a lot harder for Google to track you since it is via cookies that it identifies that you are the same person it saw last time. It can now potentially track you if you log into one of its services and then perform a search so, again, if it worries you don't log into any Google owned services or, if you do, clear out your cookies both before and after you do so.

If you want to know the information Google has stored about you then it's privacy dashboard is a good place to start.

[fredbassett]

At the end of the day I'm not overly fussed as I have ad block on and there's no way (or none that I can easily think of) that I am likely to be harmed if the world - or google - knows about my internet porn habit. But I think I can understand why people would be concerned.

[purplecat]

I think my disconnect here is that Google already knew about your porn habit. It's just that sub-systems weren't aware of what other subsystems knew, so the overall flow of information around the company has improved, but they've not magically learned anything about you that they didn't know before and that someone sufficiently malicious within the company couldn't previously access.

[purplecat]

this website also has a link so you can see how Google has you categorized.

[fredbassett]

I currently seem to be flying under google's radar.

[purplecat]

I use four different browsers (two at home and two at work - two largely so I don't keep having to log in and log out of LJ) and on only one of them does Google seem to think it knows anything about me and, as inamac has pointed out it seems to think I'm a cross-dressing American football player so, you know, not feeling all that big-brothered at the moment.

Mind you, I have some friends it got spot on.

[fredbassett]

Do you think it knows about my floppy ears and bladder problem?

[lonemagpie.livejournal.com]

Basically, people who logged in with their Youtube or Google accounts to search for porn are bricking it that Google can now tell the government what wank material they've been looking for, in case any of it's not quite legal in their country.

You'd think people would just, y'know, not log in to do that kind of search, but there you go...

[fredbassett]

But all that internet porn won't read itself! It's a hard, dirty job, but someone has to do it. *g*

[purplecat]

We know you only do it so we don't have to!

[lonemagpie.livejournal.com]

read?

I know it's world book day, but...

[fredbassett]

well, if the men are very pretty I'm quite happy to watch as well...

[purplecat]

I thought it was something like that but, you know, Google is tracking you via cookies anyway so it probably knows you've been searching for porn anyway - I'm struggling to think of a situation where combining the search terms you typed into Google Search combined with the actual videos viewed on YouTube are so staggeringly more damning than one or the other taken individually.

I feel a bit like when the ticker thing popped up on FaceBook. They already had all this information, its just you've only suddenly realised that they have it and its become a little easier for someone in the right place to put it all together.

[lonemagpie.livejournal.com]

I suspect really it's about annoying people by sticking more ads in their face, but from the kind of anti-posts we've been seeing, I'm thinking most of the antis are suddenly-worried porn-surfers...

[purplecat]

If there's going to be advertising, I would rather it was targeted. Though, you know, given how rubbish they are at identifying my actual interests...

... and there is always Ad Block if it really bugs you.

[lonemagpie.livejournal.com]

I have that, and don't have Google or youtube accounts, so it's really not bothering me...

[sixgun45lc.livejournal.com]

Come on now, admit it; you're a HUGE Oakland Raiders fan, right? ;)

[purplecat]

The whole American Football thing has me completely mystified. I assume it is actually Urban Dead related in some way since the browser in question is primarily used for playing Urban Dead. So it's possibly related to the paid ads on the game... or something... I've no idea. I can't think of when I ever searched on anything to do with American Football.

[sixgun45lc.livejournal.com]

I think that's hysterical. I don't recall you ever letting on that you were a sports fan of any sort let alone NFL football. Perhaps they're assuming facts that are not in evidence. You like killing zombies (violent) so you must like football (theoretically violent).

[purplecat]

I'm sure the idea I'm a 25-35 year old male must be Urban Dead's fault... but unless there's a football team called DHPD or something...

[sixgun45lc.livejournal.com]

Nope, nor anything close to it that I've ever heard of in college or the professional leagues. Must be the Urban Dead connection.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

...or possibly someone on her friends list is!

[sixgun45lc.livejournal.com]

*laughs* Awesome!

[purplecat]

Because, you know, anytime I want to read your blog I search on "Oakland Raiders" rather than trying to remember your username (though come to think of it!!...)

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

I'm rather disappointed that if you search for "phlegmatic raiders"*, my journal is only the fourth highest ranked page.

You're better off just using my 'NFL' tag if you ever do want to just read my American football posts...
http://philmophlegm.livejournal.com/tag/nfl



* Now doesn't that sound like a googlewhack? Of course it isn't, there are over one million results, but it sounds like one.

[jane-somebody.livejournal.com]

*Are* there even googlewhacks any more? It must be exponentially harder to hit one than in the relatively early days of the internet.