People Need to Relax About Google’s New Policy

Originally published
Note: This article was published while I was in my early 20s. I was much younger and dumber. Please don't hold it against me. One of the perils of having a 20+ year old website!

I’m going to tell you a story- an anecdote of sorts. I decide one day that I am going to, of my own free will, run down a crowded street, screaming facts about myself. “I’M 26 YEARS OLD,” “I COME FROM MIDDLETOWN, NY,” “I SING A LITTLE TOO LOUD WHEN I’M IN THE SHOWER.” A few days later, I read online that someone said I’m a 26 year old man that sings too loud in the shower and I get pissed about it. Doesn’t that seem unreasonable to you? I freely gave up this information in a very public way. This is how I view people that are reacting poorly to Google’s new privacy policy, which really, isn’t anything new.

It’s pretty astounding to me that journalists can get away with writing about things they don’t understand, at all. Take Washington Post journalist and author of this post, Hayley Tsukayama. She is a blogger and has a Master’s Degree in journalism. She is not a lawyer or a technologist, but she’s writing about a technology company’s legal agreement. And to be fair, the FAQs article that I link to is more or less fine, but there are a couple of things that people are extracting from her article that are being interpreted the wrong way, probably by design. The biggest offender is this one:

Can I opt-out?: No.

People are making a huge deal that they can’t opt-out of this new privacy policy when in reality, there is nothing to opt-out of. Google is just telling us the new ways they are going to use data that they already have. They don’t even have to do that- not as publicly as they did anyway. They aren’t making us add anything new, or use some new system. In short, they aren’t doing anything now that they couldn’t do before. They are just making it easier to do it.

Then there is this fantastic quote by Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a  privacy advocacy group:

There is no way anyone expected this

That is a pretty piss-poor statement for director of a privacy group to make. I think anyone with half a brain and a Google account could have expected this. Google is in the business of data, and they offer all of their services (or most of them) for free. Of-course they are going to leverage that data to provide what they say are better services. There is of-course, a simple way to prevent this.

Get rid of your Google account. And your Facebook account. Twitter; Linked-In; MySpace (huh?). No one is forcing you to use this stuff. You can still use Google search without a Google account and it will work just as well (maybe even better). So if you want to keep your information private, don’t go screaming it on a crowded street. Keep it to yourself.