Google Announced
Effective from Oct 3, Google on Friday announced that it will be streamlining its privacy policy. The search engine is removing redundant sections and launching a new privacy policy and it is not going to make any material changes to its policy.
Mike Yang, associate general counsel at Google, wrote in a blog post, “Long, complicated and lawyerly that’s what most people think about privacy policies, and for a good reason”. “So we are simplifying and updating Google’s privacy policies.”
The two different type of changes Google will make, it includes deleting 12 product-specific policies which the company finds repetitive. Yang wrote, “These changes are also in line with the way information is used between certain products – for example, since contacts are shared between services like Gmail, Talk, Calendar and Docs, it makes sense for those services to be governed by one privacy policy as well”.
Google also plans to make phrasing more user-friendly and cut out some of the more redundant languages. Yang said, “For example, we’re deleting a sentence that reads: ‘The affiliated sites through which our services are offered may have different privacy practices and we encourage you to read their privacy policies,’ since it seems obvious that sites not owned by Google might have their own privacy policies”.
He said, Google will also add a new privacy tools page Google Privacy Center so that “our most popular privacy tools are now in one place”. Now Google has a preview of the updated version online and it will replace the existing version on Oct 3.
Yang concluded, “Our undated privacy policies still might not be your top choice for beach reading (I am, after all, still a lawyer), but hopefully you’ll find the improvements to be a step in the right direction”. From a California based consumer group Google’s privacy policy came under fire. Similar to “do not call” lists, the group wants Congress to enact “don’t track me” legislation.
Google settled a class-action case regarding its Buzz social-networking feature on Friday. Around $8.5 million the company will hand over, which after covering expenses and attorneys fees will be given to Internet privacy and education groups.
