Google's Being Evil |wjlondon

Google’s Being Evil

As of the 1st March things at Google are changing a little much to the distaste of many.

From the 1st March Google will draw information from all your Google accounts including Gmail, Youtube, Google Circles etc and from this information, among other things decide what search results to give you. Also within these search results their own content will be prioritised.

It is all down to their new privacy policy an alert for which you’ll be sure to see if you sign into your google account now. The new policy states :

‘Our new Privacy Policy makes clear that, if you’re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services. In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience.’

So what does this mean for you? Gizmodo has spelt it out :

‘What this means for you is that data from the things you search for, the emails you send, the places you look up on Google Maps, the videos you watch in YouTube, the discussions you have on Google+ will all be collected in one place. It seems like it will particularly affect Android users, whose real-time location (if they are Latitude users), Google Wallet data and much more will be up for grabs.’

It will then give you tailored results based upon these. So why are people calling it evil? Again Gizmodo breaks it down:

‘So why are we calling this evil? Because Google changed the rules that it defined itself. Google built its reputation, and its multi-billion dollar business, on the promise of its “don’t be evil” philosophy. That’s been largely interpreted as meaning that Google will always put its users first, an interpretation that Google has cultivated and encouraged. Google has built a very lucrative company on the reputation of user respect. It has made billions of dollars in that effort to get us all under its feel-good tent. And now it’s pulling the stakes out, collapsing it. It gives you a few weeks to pull your data out, using its data-liberation service, but if you want to use Google services, you have to agree to these rules.’

So basically form March onwards if you want to do a search and come up with everything that’s on offer on the net not just what Google thinks you’ll like then don’t sign into your accounts whilst browsing.

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