Google Overhauls Privacy Policy

Google is planning to overhaul its main privacy policy in an effort to make the document more readable and usable for normal people. In addition, Google also is eliminating privacy policies for some of its individual products and services, which it deemed redundant.

The shift by Google is a pretty clear acknowledgement by the company that privacy policies, like software license agreements, are generally unreadable, and therefore go unread by virtually all consumers. Google has come under sharp criticism from privacy advocates and some consumer groups for the amount of data that they collect on users and the ways in which the company uses that data.

The company said it is not making major changes to its main privacy policy, but is instead excising some of the more inscrutable parts to make it more useful, and also is bringing some of its individual products under the main policy.

"Long, complicated and lawyerly—that's what most people think about privacy policies, and for good reason. Even taking into account that they’re legal documents, most privacy policies are still too hard to understand," Google's Mike Yang, assistant general counsel said in an explanation of the changes. "So we’re simplifying and updating Google’s privacy policies. To be clear, we aren’t changing any of our privacy practices; we want to make our policies more transparent and understandable."

Google right now has 44 separate privacy policies listed in its Privacy Center. Yang said the company will eliminate 12 of those when the changes go into effect Oct. 3.

Google also has added some content to its Privacy Center site, including a new Privacy Tools section that comprises a number of tools that let users opt-out of some of the tracking and data retention that Google does in its products. The site includes a link to the Google Dashboard, which lists all of the Google products and services linked to a given user's account and all of the information that Google knows about that account.

The page also has links to tools that let users opt out of some ad-based services, turn on Incgonito mode in Chrome and turn on encrypted search.

"Our updated privacy policies still might not be your top choice for beach reading (I am, after all, still a lawyer), but hopefully you’ll find the improvements to be a step in the right direction," Yang said in his post.

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