So Google's new privacy policy kicks in on March 1st, which is a week from today, and I've been putting off writing about it because every time I start I just get annoyed and have to walk away from the keyboard. But it's the only thing anyone in my RSS reader is talking about right now so here we go.
Quick recap for anyone who's been ignoring it: right now Google runs something like 60-plus separate privacy policies across its different products. Search has its own, Gmail has its own, YouTube has its own, Google+ has its own, and so on. Starting March 1st all of that collapses into one policy, and functionally what that means is your activity on any one Google product can get folded into a profile that follows you across all the others. Search something on Google, and that can shape what you see on YouTube. Sign into Gmail, and that identity now travels with you to Google+ and Calendar and everywhere else. There's no toggle to turn this off. If you have a Google account, you're in.
I don't think this is some sinister evil-genius plan, to be clear. I think it's mostly Google being honest that they already treat you as one identity internally and this just makes the paperwork match reality. Fine. But "we simplified 60 documents into 1" is doing a lot of work to make "we removed your ability to keep these things separate" sound like a customer service improvement, and I think a lot of people are going to open their inbox in the next week, see the notice, and just delete it without reading past the first sentence. Thats sort of the whole strategy honestly.
And the timing could not be worse for Google on the trust front. Just a few days ago it came out that Google had been bypassing privacy settings in Safari to plant tracking cookies on people who had specifically told their browser not to allow that. A Stanford researcher found it, the Wall Street Journal ran the story, and then it turned out Google was doing something similar with certain Internet Explorer cookie settings too. Google's official line was that it was some kind of unintended side effect of a feature meant to let signed-in Google users use +1 buttons, which, sure, maybe, but "unintended side effect" is a phrase that's done a lot of heavy lifting in tech PR over the years and I'm not inclined to just nod along anymore.
(Sidebar, because I have to say this somewhere: I still use Google for basically everything, Search, Gmail, Reader, all of it, and I complain about their privacy practices from inside a Chrome window with three Google tabs open. I know how that looks. I'm not going to pretend I've got some principled alternative lined up. I just think you're allowed to use a thing and also be annoyed at how it treats you, and I'm tired of people acting like that's a contradiction.)
A consumer advocacy group filed something with the FTC this week specifically asking them to block the new policy from going into effect, arguing it breaks the terms of a settlement Google made with the FTC last year over the Buzz privacy mess (remember Buzz? God, remember Buzz?). I have no idea if that complaint goes anywhere. The FTC moves slow and March 1st is right around the corner, so my guess is the policy launches on schedule regardless and this plays out as a slower legal fight in the background while everyone's already moved on.
If you actually care about keeping your Google activity compartmentalized, the only real move right now is to use separate accounts for separate things, or start logging out between services, which is a genuinely annoying way to live and almost nobody is going to do it. I might try it for a week just to see how bad it is. I'm guessing pretty bad, given how much of my day runs through one Gmail tab.
Anyway. Mark your calendar for March 1st, or don't, because it's happening either way.