Privacy Policy Changes Defended By Google

Published on January 31st, 2012

(Reuters) – Planned changes to Google Inc‘s privacy policies that have caught the attention of U.S. lawmakers would not take away the control its customers have over how data is collected and used, the company said in a blog post on Tuesday

Google, whose offerings include its flagship search engine, Gmail, YouTube and Google+ products, announced last week that it was unifying 60 of its privacy policies.

When the new policy comes into effect on Wednesday, information from most Google products will be treated as a single trove of data, which the company could use for targeted advertising.

By consolidating numerous product-specific privacy policies into one comprehensive policy, “we’re explaining our privacy commitments to users of those products in 85 percent fewer words,” said Pablo Chavez, Google’s director of public policy, on the company’s public policy blog.

A bipartisan group of eight U.S. lawmakers questioned whether the new policy would allow Internet users to opt-out of data-sharing systems and expressed concern about the safety of customer data, in a letter sent to Google last Thursday.

In a letter dated Monday, Chavez responded directly to the lawmakers’ concerns, stressing that, “the updated privacy policy does not allow us to collect any new or additional types of information about users.”

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