Tag Archives: policy

State Attorneys General Write to Google

In a letter sent earlier today, 37 state attorneys generals (or their equivalents) wrote to Larry Page, Google’s CEO, "to express our strong concerns with the new privacy policy that Google announced it will be adopting for all of its consumer products."

According to the letter:

Google’s new privacy policy is troubling for a number of reasons. On a fundamental level, the policy appears to invade consumer privacy by automatically sharing personal information consumers input into one Google product with all Google products.… More

More on Google’s Privacy Policy

Here is an excerpt from my interview yesterday with Jon Mitchell of ReadWriteWeb:

"From a legal perspective, I’m not seeing anything that’s much different in what’s being proposed to take effect on March 1 and what’s in place right now," Zick says. "In particular, the language about sharing across services has been in [Google’s policies] for a long time."

Zick points out that all the past versions of Google’s privacy policies are on the website,… More

Google Changes Its Privacy Policies

As many of you have probably seen already, Google is changing its privacy policies, effective March 1, 2012.  These changes will be effective across all of Google’s platforms, and users will not be able to opt out.  A user’s only choice to avoid these changes will be to leave Google’s search engine, Gmail, Calendar, Search, and YouTube; there is no "opt out" or selective acceptance/rejection of these new policies. … More

Lessons Learned from Facebook’s Terms of Service

By Gabriel M. Helmer and Aaron Wright

When Facebook changed its official terms of service earlier this month, what ensued was an explosive public outcry over who owns what users post to social networking sites. Tens of thousands of Facebook’s 175+ million users suddenly clicked that often-overlooked link at the bottom of the webpage and poured over the arcane and legalistic language comprising Facebook’s terms of service. … More