New Google Privacy Policy

Starting from tomorrow March 1,  Google will consolidate the privacy policy on over 60 of their web properties into one single and simplified privacy policy.

Google has created a page explaining the new policy here: http://www.google.com/policies/

However several privacy advocates and the public in general has come out expressing their concern about this update, as fundamentally this does effect our privacy using Google products.

So what does this mean?

Your search history on Google Search will be shared to other Google properties such as YouTube, Gmail etc to better serve you ads.

This does not just impact your desktop experience, if you use Google products on your mobile and signed-in Google account this will present even further information on your search habits.

Why is Google doing this?

There is no doubt Google is doing this to better their advertising products, but there has been a fair amount of scrutiny on this change – even some people suggesting this violates European Union data laws which could significantly hurt Google.

How do I opt out of Google storing my Web History?

Yes, this can be done.

1. Go to https://www.google.com/history and sign-in.

2. You then have the option of Pausing your web history. So no further information is stored.

Or you can delete some or all of your previous web history.

Here is the screenshot:

If you want to learn how to export all of your data from Google, they have put together this website: http://www.dataliberation.org/