March 1st has seen the launching of Google’s new privacy policy. The policy is aimed at consolidating the privacy policies for all their services, around 70 in all into one much simpler agreement. Regulators have wanted Google to simplify their privacy policies for a along time. However, the new policy is concerning a number of people in the US as well as in Europe.

The new GOOGLE policy links the information stored about a person, from all the google platforms into one profile. So if you have a gmail account, a blogger account and a youtube account, for example, google will store all the information about you from these different services together, regardless of how you use them.

The French internet regulatory body CNIL and EU data  authorities believes the move breaches EU data protection laws. Furthermore a coalition of agencies from Europe and America have written the the chief executive of Google urging him to delay the changes, Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD) have said, “This move has been widely criticized by US lawmakers, US Attorneys General, European lawmakers, European privacy officials, technical experts, and privacy organisations”.

Currently Google and other organisation harvest user data and store them on their servers. Google has logged every search ever conducted by their users. This information is highly valuable commercially. By building a profile up of their users using all the available data they will know you intimately. Do we really want corporations having access to that level of data about us?