Updated 4:50 pm ET Tuesday, January 31
For all users of Google’s myriad products — Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, to name a few — it’s been tough to miss that the company is updating its privacy policy.
That’s because Google has spent the past few days bombarding Google users with emails and various other alerts to read its new privacy policy, which goes into effect March 1 and combines 60 distinct privacy policies into one meta-privacy policy that the company says will simplify things, allowing Google to combine user data across its products.
The company has even addressed its privacy policy in a series of print advertisements appearing throughout the subway in New York City this week.
But the change to one privacy policy to rule them all (or most of them, as Google Wallet, Books and Chrome browser will retain their separate and distinct privacy policies due to legal reasons) has created a controversy, like most of the changes Google makes these days.
Aside from the expected criticism of some tech bloggers that policy is too broad, members of the U.S. House of Representatives have raised concerns about the great Google privacy policy consolidation.
Specifically, eight representatives — five Democrats and three Republicans — sent an open letter to Google CEO Larry Page on Friday asking 11 lengthy questions about the privacy policy change — including “Please describe all information Google collects from consumers now,” and “who has access to users’ personal information?”– and demanded answers to all of them no later than February 16, 2012.
Google, in its consummate speedy fashion, has delivered the answers two-and-a-half weeks early. Google’s director of Public Policy Pablo Chavez on Tuesday posted a letter the company sent back to the House. The 13-page-letter addresses each of the House’s questions in turn and provides some fascinating detail on to how Google views its users’ data privacy, what it’s doing and not doing with user information, and what it may do going forward.
As Chavez elaborated in a post on Google’s Public Policy blog:
We’re updating our privacy policies for two reasons:
First, we’re trying to make them simpler and more understandable, which is something that lawmakers and regulators have asked technology companies to do. By folding more than 60 product-specific privacy policies into our main Google one, we’re explaining our privacy commitments to users of those products in 85% fewer words.
Second, we want to make our users’ experience seamless and easy by allowing more sharing of information among products when users are signed into their Google Accounts. In other words, we want to make more of your information available to you when you’re signed into Google services.
Essentially, Chavez is arguing lawmakers should actually be thanking Google for making its privacy policy more understandable and accessible. In addition, Chavez notes that Google is seeking to allow “more sharing of information among products,” to provide users a better, more holistic experience.
An example of experience Google wants to be able to provide concerns YouTube. As Google’s letter to the House notes:
For example, if a user is signed in and searching Google for cooking recipes, our current privacy policies wouldn’t let us recommend cooking videos when she visits YouTube based on her searches – even though she was signed into the same Google Account when using both Google Search and YouTube.
In fact, Google seems downright excited to be able to better personalize YouTube, in conjunction with its declared aims to have YouTube compete with cable companies as America’s preferred choice of TV, as Forbes writer Kashmir Hill noted.
It’s also somewhat amusing considering Google openly admits in its letter to the House that it failed to update YouTube’s privacy policy to allow such data sharing across products when it acquired the now-ubiquitous video website on 2007. As a result, Google could share info with YouTube, but not vice-versa.
Another example of the type of experience Google wants to provide under the new privacy policy appears in an earlier video explaining the privacy changes. Google says it may soon be able to “tell you when you’ll be late for a meeting based on your location, calendar, and local traffic conditions.”
But the rest of the letter Google sent to the House is intriguing for the tightrope it walks — revealing much more information about what Google is thinking on one hand, but dodging lawmakers’ specific questions on the other.
For instance, responding to the question “describe all the information that Google collects from its consumers now,” Google immediately begins by referring the lawmakers to its privacy policy page. But the letter also explains that the company collects unauthenticated log data (non-identifying records of all interactions a computer has with any Google product), account data (all the information users willingly hand over when signing up for a Google Account, such as name, email, phone number, etc) and “service data,” not associated with any user, like the businesses that appear on Google Maps.
Answering the House’s question “Will you sell, trade, or rent user information? If so, who has access to users’ personal information?” Google again defers to its privacy policy page, but also adds: “Google does not sell, trade, or rent personally identifiable user information, and shares it with third parties only with users’ consent and in the limited circumstances described in our privacy policy, such as to satisfy valid legal requests.”
Perhaps most curious of all, considering its push to unify and simplify things for users, Google appears to advocate on several occasions in the letter that users create multiple Google Accounts — or two accounts, to be specific, one for work and one for personal — if they want to keep their information more compartmentalized under the new privacy policy. As Google states in the letter:
If a user maintains two separate Google Accounts – for example a work account and a personal account – Google will not use information from one account to personalize the other…
Furthermore, people can still set up multiple accounts to manage multiple identities, move data between those accounts with Data Liberation tools, and prevent information from one account from being used to personalize another account. If Jane wants to use Google Docs and keep that separate from her personal Google+ account, she may create a work_account_jane@gmail.com account that she uses for Docs, and a personal_account_jane@gmail.com account that she uses for sharing on Google+.
While this “multiple identities” approach is a privacy safeguarding strategy that many users employ around the Web in the age of social networking, it is odd to see Google advocating it at the same time it is encouraging a consolidation of user identity across its products.
More to the point, having two Google accounts is somewhat impractical: Users have to either use one account per browser, or go into Google’s Account Settings and under Security, actively select “Multiple sign-in.”
Ultimately, the question remains whether Google’s lengthier explanations of its new privacy policy is enough to satisfy all of the House lawmakers’ concerns. The ball is now in the lawmakers’ court. Stay tuned.
Late update: Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL), the lead signatory on the letter sent by the House to Google on Friday, has responded to Google’s answers. Stearns said Google’s answers “significantly clarified its new privacy policies,” but that “lingering questions” remained. Further, Stearns said that he wanted Google to take the “next step” and “come in and brief us” on the privacy policy before it goes into effect on March 1.
Second late update: Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), another one of the lawmakers who signed the letter to Google on Friday, has also responded to Google’s answers with a statement markedly less favorable than Stearns’, blasting the search giant’s new privacy policy as one that “undermines privacy safeguards for consumers.”
Markey goes on to note that: “It still appears that consumers will not be able to completely opt-out of data collection and information sharing among Google’s services.” In addition, Markey calls upon Google to meet with him.
