If you haven't heard by now, today is Privacy-a-geddon, when Google changes its policy so that it can legally look into your soul and cross-reference your secret hopes, dreams, and desires with what you watch on YouTube.
Here are some links to freak you out. Or not. Some of you have probably given up on "Internet privacy" by now, and assume that it's only a matter of time before you open up your underwear drawer in the morning to find Mark Zuckerberg rooting around.
- Google privacy: A user's guide (Boston Globe)
There’s a new privacy policy at Google, effective today. The big change: The company will now combine information on its users from dozens of its online services. It will compare your Google Web searches with the YouTube videos you’ve watched, your messages on the Google Plus social network, and the smartphone apps you buy in the Android Market to create a remarkably detailed dossier on your tastes and habits - which it can then use to better target the advertising it sells.
However, you do have some control over the information collected by Google and other privacy-eroding online services, like the giant social network Facebook. Each allows you to limit the information you share, and delete stuff that you would rather keep to yourself.
- Google Privacy Policies and Principles - the official policy, modified today
- How to prepare for Google's privacy changes (CNN) - "a few tips on how to keep your data a little more private on some of Google's most popular features."
- Google Privacy Checklist: What to Do Before Google's Privacy Policy Changes on March 1 (PCWorld)
- Google privacy changes 'in breach of EU law' (BBC) - "Changes made by Google to its privacy policy are in breach of European law, the EU's justice commissioner has said."
- Google Privacy: 5 Things the Tech Giant Does With Your Data (Mashable) - No.5: "Stores your information indefinitely"
- Consumer Watchdog video, 2010 - "We put the 'ogle' in 'Google.'"