WTF?! Google's New Policy On Shared Search History.

**jasonkrasnov** · 02-22-2012, 07:07 PM

According to Google's new privacy policy unification, all the searches I’ve made, and all the sites I’ve visited will be combined with several other Google products like my Google Plus account and YouTube account. That blows.

” When you sign up for a Google Account, we ask you for personal information. We may combine the information you submit under your account with information from other Google services or third parties in order to provide you with a better experience and to improve the quality of our services. For certain services, we may give you the opportunity to opt out of combining such information.”

And this part is key: “March 1, 2012 is when the new Privacy Policy and Google Terms of Service will come into effect. If you choose to keep using Google once the change occurs, you will be doing so under the new Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.”

How to avoid this? Thankfully you just need to follow a few simple steps to erase and turn off your search history. See the article below, which outlines 4 steps on how to pause/delete your Google Web History.

Any thoughts on this?

Share your feedback.

Best,

Jason

**GNex Girl** · 02-22-2012, 07:10 PM

I am going to stop using Gmail and have only a dummy Gmail account for my phone. I may give up android over this. This is way too Big Brotherish for my tastes.

**ChromeJob** · 02-23-2012, 01:39 PM

I think you Nervous Nellies may be overlooking that collected data is often used in aggregate, not stored with any connection to you personally.

From my reading of the new privacy policies, they were concatenated into one coherent policy, rather than twelve different policies for twelve different Google apps. I do want Google to start presenting unified interoperability, including my actions and searches, that's one of the things that I'm enjoying about the Google/Android application ecosystem. From my POV, that's an improvement. YMMV.

The only time it's gotten annoying is when my private domain Google Hosted Apps were getting profiles for apps I'm only using my Gmail account with. It was easy to remedy though.