European Watchdogs Challenge Google Over Its Privacy Policy 35
Trajan Przybylski writes "Information rights authorities in the UK, Germany, and Italy threatened to take legal action against Google if the company does not change its unified privacy policy. In its latest statement the ICO, Britain's information watchdog said Google's privacy policy implemented in March 2012 may not comply with the UK Data Protection Act. Many privacy activists and commentators have been critical of the data unification practice with some claiming the data sharing across web services carries serious risk of compromising people's identities as many users are not even aware their data is freely passed between Google-owned services."
Ah, the irony (Score:4, Insightful)
People log in with one account, yet they somehow may not be aware that their information may be sharing between different parts of one account?
Personally, I'm surprised people don't just consider Google to be one service with many facets at this point.
This is retarded (Score:2, Insightful)
Sorry for the term, but it is. Google wants all their services to be one thing. Whether or not that's smart as far as business goes, it should be legal. What part of this is the UK not getting? They know you're the same person on maps that you are on gmail and they want your accounts to reflect that. Even if Google reversed the policy, do you really think they wouldn't know who you are? "Oh, abc logged in from the same ip address as xyz for five years straight and chats with the same people." What... what do these people think they will accomplish by taking on Google here? Are they just bored?
Re:Not surprising ... (Score:4, Insightful)
AFAIK, there is no such thing as a YouTube account any more; it's been merged with the Google+ account system. I think what actually happened was one of two things: either you didn't have a Google+ account and one was created (more precisely, your Google account was "upgraded" to a Google+ account), or you did have one and just didn't realize that it was being used for YouTube.
In either case, if you don't want to have a Google+ account, you can delete it, either effectively downgrading it to just a Google account or you can delete your Google account entirely. Be aware, though, that a lot of Google's other services are tied to your Google account, so only delete it if you don't use Google's other services: don't buy apps on the Play store, don't use Calendar or Contacts, don't want Google to back up your device settings, don't want search history automatically propagated between your web browser and mobile device, etc., etc., etc. Personally, I think having the account adds a lot of value to both my mobile experience and my desktop experience, and I'm also of the strong opinion that I'd rather have a single Google account across all of Google's services (and to use it for single sign-on to many other web and mobile properties) rather than manage a bunch of separate accounts, but I'm biased. You can make your own evaluation and choose appropriately; most of Google's services and products can be used without an account, except where that really doesn't make sense.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google -- I'm pretty sure I'd feel the same even if I didn't work for Google, though. Note that I don't work on any of the aforementioned stuff, and am really just speaking as a knowledgeable user, albeit one who has a fairly high degree of trust in Google's competence and intention to behave responsibly with my data and use it to help me, because a big part of my job is securing the data to prevent leakage and internal abuse).