Google’s New Privacy Policy – The Counter Attack After Google Plus Failed to Make an Impact

It was March 2012 when Google introduced their new Privacy Policy. On the surface it looked simple, a perfectly aligned Google to make the consumer’s experience easy and accessible, right?

“We’ve included the key parts from more than 60 product-specific notices into our main Google Privacy Policy—so there’s no longer any need to be your own mini search engine if you want to work out what’s going on. Our Privacy Policy now explains, for the vast majority of our services, what data we’re collecting and how we may use it, in plain language.

If you’re signed in to Google, you expect our products to work really beautifully together. For example, if you’re working on Google Docs and you want to share it with someone on Gmail, you want their email right there ready to use. Our privacy policies have always allowed us to combine information from different products with your account—effectively using your data to provide you with a better service. However, we’ve been restricted in our ability to combine your YouTube and Search histories with other information in your account. Our new Privacy Policy gets rid of those inconsistencies so we can make more of your information available to you when using Google. So in the future, if you do frequent searches for Jamie Oliver, we could recommend Jamie Oliver videos when you’re looking for recipes on YouTube—or we might suggest ads for his cookbooks when you’re on other Google properties.”

We’ll come back to this Privacy Policy later.

According to the video below Google claims that their aim is to combine different services so they can give better answers/results to their users.

Now as we all know, the biggest search engine in the world isn’t likely to do anything for the pure altruistic aim of making our lives easier, and fair enough, business is business. As advertising is Google’s main income, how they pay their costs, how they fund their development team, how they keep their jobs, it’s always useful to be able to leverage it to full advantage.

Facebook Ads VS Google Ads

Now, let’s forget Google for a moment and go to Facebook. Facebook makes money in the exact same way Google does. They sell advertising. The biggest advantage Facebook always had (and still does) in comparison to Google is that they know more about us on an individual level, whilst Google mainly understands our search habits.

Facebook knows who our friends are, what we like or dislike, if we are single or married and with whom, what products we like and so on. Google has not previously had access to this information. And Facebook has definitely had the upper hand for it – as this article demonstrates: Facebook advertising revenue for 2011 has surpassed that of both Google and Yahoo.

COUNTER- ATTACK

In my view Google Plus was created in the first place purely so it could glean more information about us and the stuff we like too (+1 pages), when we were born, who our friends are, where we meet with them, what they like etc. This way their advertising will be much more accurate and thus generate even more profits. There was an interesting blog post few months ago stating why Google + doesn’t care if you never come back.

For reasons that have been explained so many times in various blog posts Google Plus did not work the way its creators were hoping for. Whether you call it market share or a below-par product, is of little importance. What it matters is that Google did not reach the desired numbers and people didn’t go for it. Things might change in the future but at the moment Facebook is still the King in social media space.

Plus didn’t work? No problem. We’ll get what we want!

So to me this is where the new privacy policy I mentioned at the beginning of the article comes into play. Google will use all of its products to gather the desired personal information about us and send MORE accurate targeted advertising to us while we search, whether we use Google Plus or not. The social network is not that popular but YouTube definitely is (second largest search engine in the UK market) as are Google alerts, Google bookmarking, Insights, Chrome store and all the other web applications we use every single day on a personal or professional level. By gathering all this information they will soon be able to understand the amount of time people spend on Facebook, gather as many information as possible and become even more credible to their customers as well as bring a solid bargaining tool to the negotiation table with their advertisers and partners.

Don’t be surprised if they aim to use this as their main marketing line: “We make sure that each person who Click on your ads has an 100% interest in your products”

Read more:

• Google’s New Privacy Policy : What It Means for Us and What We Can Do About It