For weeks now Google has displayed a link on its pages to its new privacy policy, urging people to read it, adding “this stuff matters.”
Whether you've read it or not, the new policy goes into effect today and some privacy advocates are not at all happy about it. In a nutshell, the new policy means Google will track your activity across all of its services – Gmail, YouTube, Picasa, and Google Search.
“The goal for the new Google privacy policy is to have one policy to cover all of Google’s products and services, rather than separate policies for varying services,” said Lee Humphreys,
Cornell assistant professor of communication. “Google’s intention is to create a more integrated user experience and to simplify their privacy policy for their products. Under the new system, Google will be combining user data across their various services, whereas before certain data was kept separate."