As Google continues to move ahead with their plans to change their privacy policy more concerns have been raised, this time from members of congress and\u00a0European data-protection authorities.<\/p>\n
Google new privacy policy is set to change on the 1st of March and will\u00a0consolidate 60 services under a single policy.<\/p>\n
Google state “The main change is for users with Google Accounts. Our new Privacy Policy makes clear that, if you\u2019re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services. In short, we\u2019ll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience”.<\/p>\n
On the 2nd of\u00a0February, U.S. Senators met with Google Deputy General Counsel Mike Yang and Public Policy Director Pablo Chavez to give the search giant a chance to explain the new policy and what the ramifications are for its users, as it plans to track surfers activity across all Google services.<\/p>\n
However Google do not appear to be as forthcoming as they could be about their intentions, specifically avoiding details on how it will handle user data in the future.<\/p>\n
Rep.\u00a0Joe Barton said Google “danced around actual details, and instead spoke in generalities, highlighting their efforts to ‘enhance the user experience’ \u2013 but at what cost?”.<\/p>\n
“Consumers want to know if they hit the delete button, that something truly is deleted,” says Rep. Mary Bono Mack, who arranged the meeting.<\/p>\n
She accused Google of not being “very forthcoming necessarily in what this really means for the safety of our families and our children and ourselves.”<\/p>\n
She told USA today “It was obvious to me, as I left the room, that this company has established this policy so instead of the consumer being the master of the Internet, Google is the master of the consumer. I think that is just wrong.”<\/p>\n
Jacob Kohnstamm, chairman of the\u00a0\u00a0Article 29 Working Party said “the French data-protection authority (CNIL) will be conversing with Google about the changes so that there can be no misunderstanding about Google’s commitments to information rights of their users and EU citizens.”<\/p>\n
Google responded “We briefed most of the members of the working party in the weeks leading up to our announcement. None of them expressed substantial concerns at the time, but of course we’re happy to speak with any data-protection authority that has questions.”<\/p>\n
Over recent months, congress has been investigating the possibility that Google has become too large, and are asking questions about the\u00a0possibility\u00a0of the company\u00a0promoting sites which use Google Adsense and penalizing those that don’t.<\/p>\n
What do you think? Has Google become too powerful?<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As Google continues to move ahead with their plans to change their privacy policy more concerns have been raised, this time from members of congress and\u00a0European data-protection authorities. Google new privacy policy is set to change on the 1st of March and will\u00a0consolidate 60 services under a single policy. Google state “The main change is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10587,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[389],"class_list":{"0":"post-13089","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-latest-news","8":"tag-google"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13089","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13089"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13089\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}