San Francisco — After a cartoon video portraying Google’s chief giving away ice cream to snoop on children aired on a giant screen in Times Square, the Internet search engine giant Google, over the weekend announced that it has streamlined its privacy policy, and that the new version will come in effect starting October 3rd.
The search engine leader is not making any material changes to its policy, but the text has been simplified and some bits added to make the whole thing easier to read and understand by the regular user.
“Long, complicated and professionally lawful–that is what most people believe about privacy policies, and for good reason. Even taking into account that 9819 legal documents, most privacy policies are still too hard to understand,” Mike Yang, Associate General Counsel at Google, wrote in a blog post.
“So we are streamlining and updating Google’s privacy policies. To be very explicit, we are not changing any of our privacy practices; we want to make our policies more transparent and understandable,” he added.
Google will make two different types of changes. The search engine titan will simplify wording in its privacy policy, making it more comprehensible, “cutting down the parts that are redundant and rewriting the more legalistic bits so people can easily understand them,” according to the attorney.
Initially, it will delete 12 product-specific policies that the company finds repetitive. In addition, The California-based Internet giant bundled more information into product help pages to make it easier to find and added a new privacy-tools page to the Google online Privacy Center, Yang said.
“These alterations are also in tune with the way information is used between certain products–for example, since contacts are shared between services like Gmail, Talk, Calendar and Docs, it makes sense for those services to be governed by one privacy policy as well,” Yang wrote.
For example, we are removing a sentence that reads: “The associated sites through which our services are delivered may have different privacy practices and we encourage you to read their privacy policies, since it seems obvious that sites not owned by Google might have their own privacy policies,” Yang said.
Another big alterations to its main policy which is getting a rewrite. The search engine leader will also add more content to some of its help centers so users can more easily find privacy-related information. It will also include a new privacy tools page Google Privacy Center so that “our most popular privacy tools are now all in one place,” the attorney said.
Google has a preview of the updated version online now and will be implemented starting October 3rd., replacing the existing version.
“Our updated privacy policies still might not be your top choice for beach reading (I am, after all, still a lawyer), but hopefully you will find the improvements to be a step in the right direction,” Yang concluded.
Google is providing a FAQ for the changes which should cover any uncertainties. Finally, there is also a version which shows exactly what has been removed and what has been added.
The announcement came just the same day that Google’s privacy policy came under fire from a California-based consumer rights group.
Consumer Watchdog purchased space on Manhattan’s Times Square, where a giant screen above thousands of people moving had a “Don’t Be Evil?” animated ad shown in a 15-second video that characterizes Google CEO Eric Schmidt as an evil ice cream man stealing your information at will. The group wants Congress to enact “Don’t Track Me” legislation similar to “Do Not Call” lists.
A cartoon version (see video below) of Google CEO Eric Schmidt was shown to the masses cruising through residential neighborhoods in an ice cream truck, snooping on kids and exposing their parents’ Internet browsing habits.
“We like ice cream as much as anyone, but we like privacy even more,” Google said in response to an AFP inquiry regarding the video.
“That is the reason we provide tools for users to manage their privacy online, such as Google Dashboard, Ads Preference Manager, Chrome masked mode and ‘off the record’ Gmail chat.”
Google indicated that information about its privacy tools can be found online at google.com/privacy.