The last week you might have noticed that a lot of web services updated their privacy policies. This is actually more then 60 Google privacy policies that are changing into only one and the same privacy policy for all their services.

Whether you like it or not, if you are using Google search, Google Calendar, Google Chrome, Google Maps, Google Translate, GMail, YouTube, Picasa, Android or other services from Google these privacy policies will start to work on the 1 March this year, that is, in a month from now.

The most noticeable Google privacy policy that is forced on it’s users can be read here:

Some of our Services allow you to submit content. You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.

When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps).

Also interesting are these lines:

We believe that you own your data and preserving your access to such data is important. If we discontinue a Service, where reasonably possible, we will give you reasonable advance notice and a chance to get information out of that Service.

Have you ever thought about what will happen if the online community you use the most (like Facebook or LinkedIn) disappear from one second to another? How many of the contacts you have on the web site do you also have an alternative way to communicate with?

More and more people are getting concerned over the Google privacy as you can see in the graph below, showing searches for this topic during the last years:

So which of your information do Google keep and share? In the Google privacy policy you can read the following:

When you use our services or view content provided by Google, we may automatically collect and store certain information in server logs. This may include:

• details of how you used our service, such as your search queries.
• telephony log information like your phone number, calling-party number, forwarding numbers, time and date of calls, duration of calls, SMS routing information and types of calls.
• Internet protocol address (your location).
• device event information such as crashes, system activity, hardware settings, browser type, browser language, the date and time of your request and referral URL.
• cookies that may uniquely identify your browser or your Google Account

Local storage

We may collect and store information (including personal information) locally on your device using mechanisms such as browser web storage (including HTML 5) and application data caches.

 

To be fare about it Google also have a service that helps you remove your information in their different services, or just back up the information on your local hard drive. Here is the link:  http://www.dataliberation.org

If you are concerned about Internet privacy and security then I recommend you to use NordVPN which will encrypt all your traffic and making it virtually impossible to trace you or your communication online.

Happy Googling!