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Google has decided that your privacy is no longer their "number one priority" and reversed their long-standing policy towards anonymous online ad tracking and user names; the Google DoubleClick advertising database will now be combined with all other information Google has on users, such as from Gmail and all other accounts and logins.
excerpt of the new policy:
We may combine personal information from one service with information, including personal information, from other Google services -- for example to make it easier to share things with people you know. [...] Depending on your account settings, your activity on other sites and apps may be associated with your personal information in order to improve Google's services and the ads delivered by Google. [...]
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article source:
https://www.propublica.org/article/google-has-quietly-dropped-ban-on-personally-identifiable-web-tracking
(Score: 2, Interesting) by darkfeline on Saturday October 22 2016, @08:38PM
Google does give you the option to delete any and all data that it has on you.
Many of you will question whether Google actually does delete the data, but from what I can tell, they really do (including from backups, by means of careful management of backup encryption and the encryption keys).
That doesn't account for the possibility of the data being streamed to government agencies, but I'm unsure of the extent that that's actually happening, outside of search warrants.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 22 2016, @09:37PM
If this is what you can tell, can you tell us how you know this, so we can feel as confident as you do?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by darkfeline on Sunday October 23 2016, @12:02AM
I work for Google and thus have access to all of the source code. I have not audited every line, nor audited our hardware infrastructure, nor can I disprove the existence of a conspiracy within the company.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by Common Joe on Sunday October 23 2016, @05:41AM
With all due respect, the google you describe is not the google I've been reading about.
Even when you're not logged in, it's generally understood [digitaltrends.com] that they they vacuum up any piece of information including IP addresses when I search with them. And they will remember your search queries with your IP Address. Tell me, is there any way to delete information at that level?
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday October 23 2016, @08:13PM
I don't think so, and how would that work, since that is not tied to an account? You would have to prove that you owned the data for a given IP and time range to request deletion of it.
To me, the real concern is account-tied data, since I can use a proxy/VPN to hide my IP.
Also, be sure to read the Privacy Policy. Barring government conspiracies, I encourage you to challenge any violations with respect to how your data is used. At least internally, all access to user data is carefully audited, unlike the NSA where employees have a pasttime of perusing user data for personal reason, and as far as I know we do not sell any data to third parties. We do sell ads of course, but we keep the user data for targeting to ourselves, and account-tied data can be deleted or opted out (not by default though, I have heard that users tend to opt IN once we started describing how exactly we use data to provide targeted ads. YMMV).
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