Mumbo Jumbo of Google Chrome

You probably didn’t think twice before searching your favorite topic on Google Chrome or may be checking your popularity across the online web. Not anymore.

From today you would think a hundred times before punching in any keywords to search on. Google’s new privacy policy that claims to collect data from across all the major Google products comes into force from today. SEO have become an integral part of almost all the online activities. Search engine giant, Google, has introduced a policy that makes adherence to the SEO standards.

The idea of Google knowing it all about me was so nerve wrecking that I finally decided to look into it just to know what the hype is really about and to know if there is actually any way to circumvent it.

So why did Google Chrome think about coming up with such a policy?

Google had over 70 different policies across its all products. It has decided to consolidate around 60 of these policies into one and across its major products such as Gmail, YouTube and Google+. Google earns over $38 billion annually from advertisement by search engine marketing. With this new policy, Google will be able to dig deeper into the lives of its over 1 billion users. The information that it gathers from its various platforms will be shared across all its products and can be used to provide tailor-made search engine marketing campaigns. This policy helps Google to target the ads to the relevant customers. This is particularly important considering Google gets paid every time we just click on an ad.

What Google Chrome’s new policy is capable of doing?

Google can collect all the data and search history of its various logged-in users. It doesn’t matter if you are logged- in on Gmail or YouTube. The searches you make or the videos you watch, all the information can be consolidated and identified to be a single user that is you. Google can use this information to, suggest your videos you must watch the next time you enter YouTube or provide suggestion next time you make a search. This improvises the website traffic too. Definite SEO for the website is rather an essential element, considering the new policy. It helps the businesses to reach to a targeted audience.

Google also gathers information from Google docs and calendar. Pretty intuitive eh? It can so much so give suggestions when you enter wrong spelling for your friend’s name.

So the next time when you intend to search about Hanuman Chalisa, don’t be surprised to see a suggestion of hangover cures.

About European Government Action

European government has filed cases against Google and has written letter:

“Rather than promoting transparency, the terms of the new policy and the fact that Google claims publicly that it will combine data across services raises fears about Google’s actual practices.Our preliminary investigation shows that it is extremely difficult to know exactly which data is combined between which services for which purposes, even for trained privacy professionals.”

But Google maintains that it is strong as ever on its fairness and legality issues of the privacy policy.

“We are confident that our new simple, clear and transparent privacy policy respects all European data protection laws and principles,”

What is worse is that Google does not give options to a user to reject the privacy policy.

So is there really a way to circumvent this policy?

No, not really. If you have registered accounts on Google’s product such as Gmail or YouTube, the least you can do is to accept the fact that Google does and will know everything about you.

But there is a way to minimize this

• Don’t use Google: Other search engine’s privacy policies are not as stringent as Google Chrome. Still none of them are as good as Google Chrome.
• Sign out: Don’t sign in to any products while surfing things. This is will prevent Google Chrome from associating your search history to your account. But it can still keep track of your searches by associating a unique string id to your web browser.
• Change settings: You can periodically delete the search history manually or change the settings of your Gmail account.
• Use Private browsing: You browse in the private browsing mode of your browser or incognito mode of Google Chrome. Although, your computer does not collect the cookies but your server will keep track of places you have been.

Remember whatever you do, never search your personal information such as your name, or address or credit card number.

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