cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo by Smeerch: http://flickr.com/photos/smeerch/4723524129/
And not in a good way. Yesterday Google announced a new privacy policy that will allow it to share data among all of its services, with no ability to opt-out. The depth of it’s new policy, which will go into effect March 1, is pretty astounding: it includes search history and youtube habits, but it also includes “calendar appointments, location data, search preferences, contacts, [and] personal habits based on Gmail chatter.” The only way to avoid this policy is to close your Google account entirely (and to be fair, Google does provide tools to export all of your data from their services). I’m a little surprised Google hasn’t shared more data before now (like the way they keep asking for my cell phone number in Gmail when I have a Google voice account), but the seemingly vast scope of this change is also a bit creepy.D’Arcy Norman’s post last month about control of software vs. control of data and privacy is starting to look awfully prescient.
In the Program for Online Teaching certification class, we’ve been making frequent use of Google Hangouts, but Google’s new policy makes me much more hesitant to consider using it with class. At this point I’m not sure I won’t close my existing Google account and open a new “clean” one to access hangouts. I’m also re-thinking my refusal to use Facebook, now that Google has leapfrogged them on privacy invasion rubric.
I had the exact same thoughts as you. I just used a Google Hangout with my students for the first time and had some of them use Blogger and . . . well, I’m actually feeling bad about that now. Blogger I could do without (it was the biggest tech pain for the entire course), but the Hangouts were really nice. Now I’ll have to find some other video chat tool to use.
I’m also shocked at how thoroughly Google has managed to get its tentacles into my online existence. I’ve just started transitioning out of gmail, and I fear it may take me until the end of February to get everything out of my Google account and close it down. I can’t believe I’ve let my self become so monopolized.
Are you moving to another email service or hosting your own email? I’m trying to figure out what to do with my gmail account as well.
Hosting my own–I’ve moved my blogs back to a self-hosted wordpress installation, so I had a hosting account with available email addresses already.
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